Don’t Cancel Your Exam Score!

When you sit down to take the MCAT, you have already prepared for months. You probably have a loose idea of how you will score, especially if you’ve followed our FREE Ecourse and done those AAMC mini exams and full-lengths. With our MCAT Study Plan, there’s even a tab where you can track your progress over time to see your growth!

MCAT Self Prep Free Ecourse

All of this is meant to show you that you have put so much planning and effort into preparing for this test. Your thought process on test day, though, is significantly different than looking at your previous full-lengths. Instead of getting to see your results immediately, you have to wait 5 weeks (or for 2020, 2.5 weeks) for your exam to be scored. And you have to make a quick decision on whether to cancel your exam score just after finishing the Behavioral Science section.

MCAT Self Prep Free Ecourse

MCAT Self Prep Free Ecourse

At this moment, you’re not going to remember every problem or have an accurate gauge of how you scored. At least 90% of the students I have worked with felt bad walking out of the exam, they could only remember the handful of problems that they got down to 50-50 chances or had no idea how to approach. More importantly, how those students felt about that MCAT did not correlated with their actual results on the MCAT. 

You Owe it to Yourself to See What Score you Earned

Because you have put in so much work and chose not to push your test date back when you had the opportunity to, there is no reason to act out of fear and void your test score. You owe it to yourself to see what score you earned, and even the highest-scoring students will still have that fear once they answer their last question. It’s worth getting the feedback and knowing how you did.

It takes a really unique, unexpected circumstance to affect you to make voiding your exam a reasonable choice. Over my years in this role, I have worked with exactly one student who had this happen: he was working on the Behavioral Science section when his computer screen went black. It took about 20 minutes for the testing center to restore his test, but they could not add back that lost time. 

Because there were extenuating circumstances that came up during his test significantly hurt his ability to finish and would have decreased his score by many points, he decided to void the test and reschedule for the next possible date. This was an unavoidable stroke of bad luck no one could plan for. If taking your MCAT does go as planned and practiced, as it does for >99% of students, you should submit it to be scored. Similarly, if you become violently ill during the test or experience other forms of medical impairment, we would recommend voiding your test as those conditions will not accurately reflect your capabilities. 

If you have any more questions about preparing for the MCAT or what to do on test day, consider signing up for tutoring or a FREE 10-minute consultation by sending a message to me or Andrew!

Warm Regards,
Timothy

MCAT self prep tutor Timothy NolanMCAT Self Prep Elite Tutor Timothy Nolan

Timothy is a medical student who has helped over 100 students succeed on the MCAT. Not only did he score in the 99th percentile, he also has extensive understanding of MCAT questioning and has written hundreds of practice questions!

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How we Matched up the Khan Academy Passages with the eCourse Lessons

Each lesson of the eCourse contains links to 1 to 5 Khan Academy science passages for the purpose of providing you with non-AAMC material to practice your science passage reading skills on. By completing all the linked passages within every lesson, you will have finished all the freely available Khan Academy science passages.

To match up the Khan Academy Science Passages with the eCourse lessons, we carefully examined the passage and question content of each one. Then we decided which lesson of the eCourse best correlated with that content. You may notice that some passages don’t match up perfectly with the current lesson. If they don’t match up with the current lesson, they should match up with one of the previous lessons in the module. We did this carefully so that you could practice your science passage reading skills on passages that contain the content you’ve already learned.

Why we don’t recommend non-AAMC CARS practice questions

We recommend practicing CARS by reading non-AAMC CARS passages but not doing the associated practice problems. The reason we don’t recommend doing the practice problems is because the MCAT is written by the AAMC. They have a very unique style in which they write CARS practice questions that third-party companies (try as they might) are unable to replicate. When students spend time on non-AAMC CARS practice problems, they get familiar with the wrong style of questioning, leading them to overthink and incorrectly respond to the questions written by the AAMC. Thus, it is in your best interest to solely practice on AAMC CARS practice questions.

That said, we highly recommend practicing your reading skills on non-AAMC CARS passages. In our Ultimate CARS Strategy Course, we provide you with 1,000 free CARS passages and 100+ homework assignments, giving you ample material to practice on. Reading countless passages while practicing the proper reading habits and strategies will prepare you well to conquer the CARS section as it was written by the AAMC.

Which books do the lessons match up with?

The books we use in each lesson are linked below. We plan to stick with these older editions of the books since very little has changed and the older editions are much more affordable:

First Edition of the Kaplan 7-book Series
First Edition of the Princeton 7-book Series

Do the chapters match up perfectly?

The Kaplan Books, Princeton Books, and Khan Academy Videos were all produced by different authors. For this reason, there are some chapters in the Kaplan Book or Princeton Book that are not even found in the Khan Academy Videos and vice versa. For instance, the Kaplan and Princeton Books have chapters that cover certain experimental procedures that the Khan Academy Videos do not cover.

Our goal in matching up the books with the videos was to correlate the content as best as possible while also covering ALL the content from every resource. For this reason, when nothing in the Kaplan Books matched up with one of the video playlists, instead of leaving the reading assignment for Kaplan blank, we inserted material that did not fit in anywhere else (i.e. one of those chapters on an experimental procedure that was not covered by Khan Academy). So, when the assignment doesn’t appear to match up right, please know that this was intentional.

*If you follow the reading assignments outlined, you will finish the entire Kaplan 7-book series and/or Princeton 7-book series by the time you finish all 10 content modules.

Do the sections match up perfectly?

If the sections assigned in our eCourse do not match up with the sections contained in your content review book, you may have a different edition. The sections should still match up the large majority of the time, but in the rare instance that they don’t, I’d recommend simply reading sections that do match up and saving the ones that do not for a future lesson.

MCAT Launchpad Required!

Before jumping into our free eCourse, you’ll need to complete orientation by watching MCAT Launchpad. During this free 35-minute intro session with Head Tutor Andrew, you’ll learn 6 Keys to Earning a Top MCAT Score, the 5 Essential Elements of an Effective Study Plan, 12 Tips for Taking the Best MCAT Study Notes, and more! Andrew will also provide you with a detailed overview of the Free MCAT Prep Course, teaching you how to get started.

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