Practice Test 1 coming in November

[jb94mg]

Not sure if this has been posted, but it looks like the AAMC finally announced when Practice Test 1 is coming out: https://www.aamc.org/students/applying/mcat/prepare/

A 300-question Question Bank is apparently being released as well.

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[El-Rami]

Well, that's pretty awesome. I wish I had those materials for my MCAT prep!

 

[GrapesofRath]

We all knew an official practice was coming out. The good news from this is

a) a real scoring curve/scale for that test so people have a real idea of where they stand rather than having to speculate based off old AAMC scoring curves.
b) The 300 question pack(which by the way is alot) that we didn't know about. Included now are the psych/sociology questions people have been clamoring for a while. Let's see if these are harder than the old practice test released last year; tons of people said there was a huge disparity between the real psych/soc and the practice test released last fall.
c) All in all people have 530 more questions written by the AAMC to work with. That's alot. Comparatively, the old MCAT AAMC tests had about 140 questions. They only released 9 tests or so in a 20 year span(excluding AAMC 1 and 2) and only 2 the final 8-9 years of the old MCAT. This is a really good sign they've already released so many practice questions. And it doesn't sound like they are recycling old questions from the prior released versions like they did for the question packs.

So all in all everybody's a winner here.

 

[jb94mg]

We all knew an official practice was coming out. The good news from this is

a) a real scoring curve/scale for that test so people have a real idea of where they stand rather than having to speculate based off old AAMC scoring curves.
b) The 300 question pack(which by the way is alot) that we didn't know about. Included now are the psych/sociology questions people have been clamoring for a while. Let's see if these are harder than the old practice test released last year; tons of people said there was a huge disparity between the real psych/soc and the practice test released last fall.
c) All in all people have 530 more questions written by the AAMC to work with. That's alot. Comparatively, the old MCAT AAMC tests had about 140 questions. They only released 9 tests or so in a 20 year span(excluding AAMC 1 and 2) and only 2 the final 8-9 years of the old MCAT. This is a really good sign they've already released so many practice questions. And it doesn't sound like they are recycling old questions from the prior released versions like they did for the question packs.

So all in all everybody's a winner here.

I found this interesting too: "The questions cover the natural sciences (emphasis on biochemistry)." Looks like they're being plenty explicit about how much biochemistry is going to continue to be emphasized. But yeah, I think the real scoring will help people who're studying for it a ton since a lot of people have to go off of percentages and rough estimates. Seems pretty rough/suboptimal to have to guess how much your score's going to jump on the real deal from your, for example, Kaplan practice tests average. I think that is one of the big advantages people studying for the old MCAT had.