Practice MCAT

If you read my previous post about the used car salesman I met at the Kaplan center, you may be wondering to yourself two things (maybe not)

1) Did you get a pitch from UCS to take the prep class
2) What was your score?

In response to the first question I actually had my score report explained to my by the woman in the room, who was much nicer, and less smarmy. She did mention that I would benefit from taking the course, but in a more of a "well studying doesn't hurt anyone" and she wasn't pushy at all. She mentioned the course and then dropped the matter, speaking to me about medical school and what I did now and all that jazz. Honesty if she were the only person I had heard from that day (instead of UCS) I would have probably considered taking the course (oh.. and if it weren't 1900 bucks).

As for the second question, I scored a 32. Seeing as how I was fully prepared to score in the low 20's due to my lack of studying I was pleasantly surprised by that score. If I scored the same on the real thing I would be competitive pretty much anywhere in the state of Texas. Of course I'm going to do a lot more studying between now and then so one would hope that my score would only go up. I knew there were several questions on the test that I was thinking "hmmm I know that I knew this at one point in my life..." and so if I learn all that recall information I will do much better on the actual MCAT. I actually preferred the passage based questions to the straight recall questions because I felt that I could reason through the passage based questions much more than the other type, which seemed to rely much more on recall of formulas and facts.

Anyone who has taken the actual MCAT I have a question for you:

I felt like there was not enough time to work through the physics/chemistry type problems, and on the practice exam we did not have access to a calculator. I'm not sure if this is the same on the computer based exam, but I would assume so.

That being said: Do you feel that many of the questions test your ability to think through a problem using information you learned from the different subject areas versus your ability to plug into a formula and find the correct answer? I would think it would be difficult to work through some of these problems given the time restraint and the lack of a calculator.

Any thoughts?