Experimental Questions?

[Guest Draff]

I was reading about experimental questions and was wondering if they're marked? Or are they there to simply trip people up?

 

One verbal passage I had comes to mind |I

[Guest frenchfrog]

What do you mean by experimental questions?

[Guest Draff]

Apparently, they're questions that AAMC uses to guage difficulty or something of that sort -- and they aren't actually marked.

[Guest nostalg]

So there could be a whole passage in a section that wouldn't even count?

What if someone did well on that passage, and badly on another. I don't see how this is fair.

Can someone please explain more to me about experimental questions?

[Guest kaymcee]

Alright, let's clear up some confusion here.

 

In the "Official August '05 Post-MCAT Thread" someone mentioned the difficulty of experimental passages, i.e. passages that described experiments and had data rather than just background information.

 

Someone then mis-took "experimental passages" as "test passages", which then led us up this road.

 

Although all the information I've heard about the nature of questions on the MCAT have been from secondary sources, there has been word that the MCAT has questions (NOT entire sections) that aren't marked. I'm not sure what purpose they serve, or if they even exist, but from what I understand, they're discrete questions not entire passages.

[Guest Kirsteen]

Hi there,

 

It's true, the AAMC does reserve the right to insert experimental passages in any of the multiple choice MCAT sections. These experimental passages are included in real MCAT exams, but they are not scored. Therefore, every test writer remains on a level playing field, i.e., everyone has their experimental question answers discarded no matter how well or badly they performed on those questions.

 

The AAMC most probably inserts these passages to assess their difficulty, i.e., if they end up being an easy, medium or hard type of passage. As most of us know, once you write a few full-length MCAT exams, you get a feeling for the three levels of difficulty among passages. If they didn't have this type of validation in place, then the exams could potentially be a heck of a lot harder or easier, on the whole.

 

Cheers,

Kirsteen