🤔 Lawsuit

[Esmolol]

Make MCAT pass/fail...!!! Can you imagine the mess?! Sounds like a 2020-2022 thing.

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[Niwrad]

Make MCAT pass/fail...!!! Can you imagine the mess?! Sounds like a 2020-2022 thing.

It's not that unreasonable, with a caveat:

Previously the MCAT was scored from 3-45 (2 digit scoring) and is now scored from 472 - 528 (3 digit scoring). The range was 42 then 56, or essentially not that big of a change given that there's now 4 sections instead of 3.

At first it seems totally illogical to have a 3 digit score in which the minimum score is 472. However, what's written between the lines is the AAMC is emphasizing that the difference between an average applicant and an outstanding applicant isn't that large. The difference between 500 and 520 does not look nearly as large as the difference between 25 and a 35 even though both represent roughly the same percentile rank difference.

Pass/fail is the most extreme version of demonstrating that most applicants are well qualified. I don't see the MCAT going p/f anytime soon, but still they are clearly trying to reduce the emphasis on differences in MCAT scores.

I see what you're getting at, but a better analogy is probably the NFL draft. Teams know what they're looking for, and they have a lot of information on individual players, but the process is both art and science. And sometimes, in spite of your best efforts to find the next Tom Brady, you end up with a Danny Wuerffle.

Not particularly familiar with team drafts, but I can imagine.

From what I understand about the NFL draft, the purpose is so that no one team just dominates all the others every year by drafting the best players, which then attracts the best future players, and is a positive feedback loop ensuring that one team always is the best. I can't imagine this is the case. Do some of the high quality students get admitted into low quality program as a means to balance out the quality of the student population among all schools?

 

[Med Ed]

Not particularly familiar with team drafts, but I can imagine.

From what I understand about the NFL draft, the purpose is so that no one team just dominates all the others every year by drafting the best players, which then attracts the best future players, and is a positive feedback loop ensuring that one team always is the best. I can't imagine this is the case. Do some of the high quality students get admitted into low quality program as a means to balance out the quality of the student population among all schools?

No, and this is taking the analogy in an unintended direction.

 

[Putkernerinthehall]

While I do think admissions should be blinded to an extent, we’d definitely be doing the medical community and our own eduction a disservice if everyone in medical school was a generic white guy.

Actually they'd all be Asian but your point is well taken.

 

[srirachamayonnaise]

It's not that unreasonable, with a caveat:

Previously the MCAT was scored from 3-45 (2 digit scoring) and is now scored from 472 - 528 (3 digit scoring). The range was 42 then 56, or essentially not that big of a change given that there's now 4 sections instead of 3.

At first it seems totally illogical to have a 3 digit score in which the minimum score is 472. However, what's written between the lines is the AAMC is emphasizing that the difference between an average applicant and an outstanding applicant isn't that large. The difference between 500 and 520 does not look nearly as large as the difference between 25 and a 35 even though both represent roughly the same percentile rank difference.

Pass/fail is the most extreme version of demonstrating that most applicants are well qualified. I don't see the MCAT going p/f anytime soon, but still they are clearly trying to reduce the emphasis on differences in MCAT scores.



Not particularly familiar with team drafts, but I can imagine.

From what I understand about the NFL draft, the purpose is so that no one team just dominates all the others every year by drafting the best players, which then attracts the best future players, and is a positive feedback loop ensuring that one team always is the best. I can't imagine this is the case. Do some of the high quality students get admitted into low quality program as a means to balance out the quality of the student population among all schools?

Really??? You think the reason why it's 3 digits vs 2 digits is to make it look like 500 and 520 is not that different from each other?! The real reason is that the new score should have no overlap with the old score so that they won't be confused when both scores were used. The interval from the 3-45 era is the same as the interval between 472 to 528 era. Each section is still measured on the scale of 1 to 15, now it's 118 to 132. However, they wanted to avoid using the old scale because then a person scored 40 (10, 10, 10, 10) in the new system while applying for admissions in 2017 would not be able to be distinguished from a 40 (13, 13, 14) from the old system. So what they can do is first to add 17 to the original scale (which brings the median to exactly 100, a nice whole number), so they would get each section of 18 to 32, but that doesn't solve the problem because there can still be confusions ( as in 18 in total score vs 18 in one section), so then they add 100 to each section. And that's why they came up with the new scoring system...

 

[Med Ed]

Really??? You think the reason why it's 3 digits vs 2 digits is to make it look like 500 and 520 is not that different from each other?! The real reason is that the new score should have no overlap with the old score so that they won't be confused when both scores were used. The interval from the 3-45 era is the same as the interval between 472 to 528 era. Each section is still measured on the scale of 1 to 15, now it's 118 to 132. However, they wanted to avoid using the old scale because then a person scored 40 (10, 10, 10, 10) in the new system while applying for admissions in 2017 would not be able to be distinguished from a 40 (13, 13, 14) from the old system. So what they can do is first to add 17 to the original scale (which brings the median to exactly 100, a nice whole number), so they would get each section of 18 to 32, but that doesn't solve the problem because there can still be confusions ( as in 18 in total score vs 18 in one section), so then they add 100 to each section. And that's why they came up with the new scoring system...

You and @Niwrad are both right. They didn't want the scoring systems to overlap and they wanted to reframe the interpretation of the new scores. Hence the whole "Top of the Curve!" campaign we were subjected to back in 2015-2016. Only one of these succeeded.