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*Good luck on the MCAT!


Guest Ian Wong

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Guest Ian Wong

Author:*Ian Wong

Date:***8/18/2000 7:20 pm*PST

*

Ditto. Best of luck to everyone tomorrow! Come back and tell us how it went!

 

Ian, MS2

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Guest Ian Wong

Author:*SP

Date:***8/20/2000 10:17 am*PST

*

I am so glad it is over! I was not a fan of the test. The verbal reasoning articles really sucked and all of those physics formulas that we all memorized were useless. Everyone seemed to be unhappy with the the test. But, we all partied hard last night and will not worry about it until the dreaded envelope comes in the mail!

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Guest Ian Wong

Author:*Simon Chiu, UG3

Date:***8/20/2000 11:52 am*PST

*

I think Ian (the webmaster) asked if someone could talk about the Saturday MCAT.

 

Anyway, here's what I thought of the test.

 

Verbal: I have to agree with SD. This section was difficult. I ran out of time, almost. I finished the section with a couple of minutes left, but I can imagine that if I did not constantly looked up at the clock to check myself, I might have missed the mark. It was surprising because in regular practice AAMC tests, I could finish the verbal in like 65 minutes (incl tests 3 & 4), so I expected to have a lot of extra time in the real test. They gave a lot of passages which required you to think (in between the lines). It was not so much that the passages were difficult to understand, but that the questions were simply difficult to answer.

 

Physical: Fairly straight forward. There weren't really any curve balls, at least from what I thought about it. The biggest concern here was that sometimes I spent too much time on one question, which caused me to be a little bit rushed. You definitely had to know some formulas, and I don't think there were questions you could have answered without having memorized them!

 

Writing Sample: I was really glad in this section that I memorized some quotes from GS (by Ferdinand) as I was able to use some of them. Nothing tricky here except write your essays with depth, etc etc etc. :)

 

Biological: Not as bad as I thought it would be. Organic chemistry stuff seemed to be quite straightforward. Some biology related questions stumped me, but that was probably because they required me to have memorized the information (and I didn't). A lot of the answers, I think, can be reasoned out.

 

Conclusion: I think the biggest problem of this Saturday's MCAT was that it caused a lot of people to rush for time. Some classmates had to finish 50+ M/C questions in the last 25 minutes for some of the sections. That is not a good strategy to take; so for anyone taking the MCAT next year, the advice is to PACE YOURSELF and keep looking at the clock after every passage/section.

 

Any comments?

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Guest Ian Wong

Author:*Claire

Date:***8/21/2000 8:28 pm*PST

*

I wrote the mcat on sat. However, there were more than one version of the test. The difficulty was similar from what i heard from my friends but time was definetly an issue. I ran out of time on verbal reasoning. if i only had 5 more minutes...anyhow, i'm glad its over but i wish that i had written it in april so that I would have had a summer. I think that i would have done just as well if I wrote it then. Oh, well at least i know what to expect if i write it again.

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Guest Ian Wong

Author:*Ian Wong

Date:***8/21/2000 11:05 pm*PST

*

Hmm. That's pretty much the read I got from some of my friends who took the exam this weekend. The questions were significantly harder than what they were expecting, and what they had prepared for using the prep books at the local bookstore.

 

If everyone felt this way, then it might work to your favour, as the MCAT is scaled to reflect your percentile rank. So, if your neighbour didn't do well either, your marks might come up yet.

 

Ian, MS2

 

PS: Anyone else take the MCAT out there? What did you think? More importantly, what did you use to study for the MCAT, and would you use the same things again the next time?

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Guest Ian Wong

Author:*EW

Date:***8/22/2000 1:35 pm*PST

*

yeah the VR section was a lot harder than what i expected. the passages weren't hard but the ques seemed harder than the practice items from the aamc and the Gold Standard. though studying from Doc Ferdinand's Gold Standard Text seemed to prep me for the PS & BS. the Gold Standard was amazing for review of the basic sciences and in fact, i felt that i learned more from it than i did from my classes.

hopefully we all found the VR to be hard and the aamc scales it accordingly.

anyways, enough mcat talk. finally it's over and hopefully none of us who went through it has to go through it again!

have a great summer (i mean 2.5 wks)!

 

EW

UG 3

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