@begood95 You are quite arrogant to claim perfect knowledge of my motives. You are a cyberbully and I am not intimidated.
1. I am a tutor.
2. Yes, I am paid for my tutoring services.
3. Not even ONE of my current students found out about Altius through SDN. My roster is full. I'm not "secretly" hoping to convince anyone to use my services.
4. Beyond my current students, I do NOT profit personally from anyone buying Altius products or services. Further, I do not consider exchanging my very limited time for a fair wage as "profiteering." I may work for Altius, but that's far from my personal motivation for posting here. I'm not even in this for a job. I do not need a job; they asked me to tutor again this year when I at first told them I could not; it is very HARD for me to balance tutoring with school and family obligations. I do it because I care about students.
5. You have zero basis for accusing me of being a "shill" simply b/c I am paid to do my job. You won't become a doctor and work for free. If someone wants to ignore all of my advice b/c the company I work for
might benefit in some roundabout way if they followed that advice, they are free to do so. I have not said one thing on this forum that could not be applied without ever purchasing a single Altius product or service.
You have erroneously conflated every single claim you've made, and fail to understand what I've said:
Do I suggest that students prepare for SB-level difficulty? Yes. Do I tell them their test will be "ARMAGEDDON" or anything close to that? Never.
Did I state that I do not believe that standardized exams equate scores perfectly between exams?
Yes. Did I suggest that the AAMC was "out to make students fail?"
Never.
As for my references to peer-reviewed journals on psychometrics, I've read tons of them. Have you? Do you know what Item Response Theory (IRT) is? Do a little reading, here's one to get you started:
ERIC - Asymptotic Standard Errors of Observed-Score Equating with Polytomous IRT Models, Journal of Educational Measurement, 2016. I'll give you more if you understand that one.
I doubt you'll take my reading assignment, but if you did, you might understand that IRT, and any standardized exam such as the MCAT, always assumes that items and exam forms are NOT of the same difficulty. The concept of score equating attempts to account for those differences. By definition, there is always a
standard error associated with score equating. It is a statistical and logical impossibility for the AAMC or anyone else to claim that exams composed of different items can be made identical using a score scale.
My message to students is simple: Not only is the MCAT
NOT an exam so hard that you cannot succeed on it; the MCAT is an exam that
any student can OWN (i.e., 90th% and ABOVE) if they 1) put in the necessary sacrifice and 2) approach the exam with the proper perspectives and understanding.