As of Wednesday, pre-medical students across the nation will be able to register for the revised edition of the MCAT, the medical college admission test, which will be administered in April. For the first time since 1991, the Association of American Medical Colleges has altered the exam, including more concepts from across multiple disciplines such as psychology, sociology and biochemistry. The revised MCAT will also be twice as long, use a different scoring scale and take what Kaplan Test Prep calls “a more medical approach.”
Owen Farcy, director of the MCAT 2015 program at Kaplan, said that the biggest change to the test itself is the added social sciences content. This alteration will affect pre-med students’ course load, as well as the specific courses they will have to take in preparation.
“Rather than just the eight semesters of courses that they were expected to have for the MCAT previously, they’re going to be expected to have eleven semesters of coursework to be ready for the new test,” Farcy said. “That means that there’s a fairly substantial change in the ways that students will have to schedule those classes to make sure they’re covering everything.”
However, Farcy said these changes are not unfounded.
“It’s due to a couple of different factors,” he said. “To be fair, the AAMC has been considering these factors for a long, long time. A fairly standard practice with standardized tests is to change the test on a fairly regular basis.”
The additional content is also a result of many medical schools’ desire for their future students to have a strong foundation in the social and behavioral sciences. These disciplines, Farcy said, play a large part in the practice of modern medicine, so it is beneficial for students to be familiar with them.
Jackie Birnbaum, a second-year student at Boston University’s School of Medicine, had an opportunity to take part in beta testing of the new section at BU last year and said the changes to the test were worthwhile.
“There was some factual material, in terms of knowing theories of some psychology or sociology or whatever it was, but it seemed more geared towards being able to interpret the studies,” she said. “And that is a skill that is certainly applicable and useful in medical school, in terms of being able to critically evaluate scientific literature. So yeah, I do think it is appropriate.”
But not all current pre-med students feel the same way about the changes to the MCAT. Camille Silva, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, said she has mixed feelings about the revised test.
“There’s good and bad in it,” she said. “I like that it’s more based on how it’s going to be when you’re a doctor and how it’s more applied. That’s really cool, but how they’re making it a scale on the test makes it a completely different way to study.”
The changes will bring along a new study process for students as well, Silva said.
“From studying for the one before to moving on to this one, it’s going to be completely different because before, it was only three hours,” she said. “And I can do three hours. Five or six hours is like — you have to do more actual testing to practice for it. Which annoys me, obviously.”
In 2014, 252 BU students applied to medical school, according to the AAMC, making BU home to one of the largest pre-med communities in the country.
Pre-med students taking the MCAT this year, however, might have a little less to worry about in terms of these changes to the test.
“The first year of admission is going to be, I guess I would say, flexible when it comes to looking at scores,” Farcy said. “But a lot of that remains to be seen.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that the MCAT had not been updated since 1992, rather than 1991. The story has been updated to reflect this change.
