Are You Ready For Your MCAT? When To Postpone Your MCAT Date

Show Notes

Ever ask yourself 'am I ready for the MCAT'? There comes a point in every premed's journey where we ask ourselves this question and need to decide whether we need to push back or test date. After successfully walking many students through this decision, AND making the right decision during her own MCAT prep, Ariana (MS2, 515 scorer, and MCAT Mastery Mentor) has created this video to guide you on when it makes sense to push your test date back and when it doesn't!

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Hey there, this is Monica just here to let you guys know that we release a lot of our YouTube clips like this one on our podcast for those of you who prefer listening over watching a video. If you want to watch the full video, head on over to our YouTube channel. So the link to that is in the show notes for you guys. In this episode, Ariana gives her answer to the question we all ask ourselves as we're getting closer and closer to test day. Am I ready for the MCAT or should I push it back? So I hope you guys like this one. One of the questions a lot of students have is whether they should push back the MCAT or not. And this is something that you kind of have to look at because a lot of times you'll feel like you want to push it back and you don't need to, or you might get this gut feeling you need to push it back and you're right, it's time to push it back. So what we're going to talk about is kind of how do you evaluate if it's time to push it back or if you're just kind of letting anxiety drive you and you don't need to push it back, you need to go ahead and take your test. And I experienced this. I actually moved my test back twice and then ended up wanting to move it back a third time, but decided not to. And that was the right choice because they got a score that I was happy to apply with. So I understand kind of both sides of wanting to push it back and going for it and needing to push it back and also wanting to push it back, but deciding to take the test. So what I'm going to kind of break this down by is when you know it's the right thing to break to go ahead and take the test and when you're kind of letting anxiety kind of drive you and that's making you not want to take the test. So let's talk a little bit about both of those. So let's talk a little bit about here when it's the right thing to push your MCAT back. So the first part of this is really going to focus on practice material. If you first and foremost, the biggest red flag that you can have is if you're taking full length practice test and you are not scoring near your goal, score it all. For instance, if you're scoring in 504, kind of 505 range and your goal scores of 510, you're not ready to take the test. You need to push it back. This is probably the biggest reason we have tutoring students who are retaking come to us. It's like I knew I wasn't ready. I wasn't sure, but I decided to take it anyways. And so please don't do that. You're better off pushing it back. It just doesn't work out for you. And in fact, it ends up being worse for you because when you go to apply, the schools are going to see you applied, taken the test multiple times. And so you're better off just pushing it back and getting the score that you want then trying to take it, getting a mediocre score that you're not going to apply with and then being frustrated when it's time to apply and then having to eventually retake it. So if your score is not near where you want it to be, do not take the test. The next thing you kind of want to look at is practice material. Have you done all of the double AMC material? The people who write the double AMC material also write the MCAT. So there's no reason for you to take the MCAT. If you've not done all the practice materials, the test makers have given you. I actually personally tell my tutoring students to do the ChemVis question pack twice and the section mix twice because I feel like the best way to understand the MCAT is do the practice material from the people who wrote it. No different than in a class. If your professor assigned you practice tests and said this is kind of exactly what my test is going to look like, you would do that homework to get a good score on your test. So things here should not change for the MCAT. Make sure you do all the practice material. And another side of this is making sure that you're doing practice tests. A lot of students will take one, two, maybe three practice tests and then show up at the MCAT, take the MCAT, and they're like, wow, my scores just weren't what I was expecting. The MCAT says seven and a half hour long test. It's probably the longest test you've taken up until this point. And so it's really hard to keep up that mental stamina that long without practice. You need to think of practice tests like training yourself for a marathon. You need to continually kind of work at it, build at it, evaluate where you're getting tired, how can you kind of overcome that? This is not something that can happen in two or three practice tests. It's going to take more like six, seven, eight practice tests to really kind of get to that point. And the second part of that is that if you've only taken one or two practice tests and you walk into the MCAT, you're going to kind of walk in, still be unsure like what to expect, how it should go. If you've done eight practice tests and your MCAT's your ninth one, you're going to walk in and know what to expect, how you time each section, where you're kind of go wrong, how to pay attention to that, all of these things. So in this context, practice might not make perfect, but it's going to make much closer to perfect than if you don't practice at all. Another thing here that kind of tricks people up is like, all right, my goal scores are 510, like I'm scoring a 508, 509 range, like am I ready? But then when they look at their score breakdown, they've got like 127s, 128s for most things, or even with some 129s. But then they have like a 122 in cars, for instance. And so you really want to have a balanced MCAT score. It's better to have some lower scores, lower as in 128 range or 127 than to have like a 121 and a 130 in one section. It just shows like a big discrepancy and it almost makes it look like one of those is a fluke. So you want to really focus on kind of keeping your scores close together. So if you have a section that's significantly lower, don't take the MCAT. For instance, if you're kind of scoring around a 507 range and say you need like a 126 in cars, if you end up scoring a 121 or you like you're scoring 121, you can end up with a 502. And there's a big difference in an application between a 502 and a 507. So just those five points in one section like cars can really make a difference. And whether your application gets looked at and you get an interview and have time to shine or if you get sent straight to the reject pile because you just had a really low score in one section. So don't push it. Take time to push your test back if one score is lower than the other. And so that kind of leads me into the next portion of this, which is pushing your test back, not necessarily because of practice material but of other circumstances. So when to know kind of when to push it back because of outside things. So one thing you want to look at is January test date. A lot of people, myself included, actually, this is why I pushed back the first time is they kind of get really idealistic when the MCAT kind of calendar comes out. And they're like, all right, it's October. I'm going to study from October to January. Take the test, score great, met Apple deset. Christmas and holidays are really, really hard time to study, especially if you're in school, if you have a family, all of these things kind of play a role. And so don't overestimate or even kind of estimate accurately how much you're going to get done because you're probably going to do less than that. You really need to substantially underestimate how much work will get done during the holidays. So don't be idealistic about January. There is not a difference between taking the January date and an April date. You'll still get your scores back in time to apply by June 1st. And the other thing to keep in mind is that you never want to go into the test with the idea of taking a retake. So if you're like, all right, I'm going to take it in January. If I get a bad score, I can take it again in April. Absolutely not. You never want to kind of have that mindset. You want to give it your best shot. And again, the more times you take it, it's going to be harder to get into school to schools with that score. So you want to make sure you're giving it your best shot the first time you take it and any time you take it after that, if you need to take it a second time, best shot the second time. All right, another kind of time that it's good to push back is if you have some sort of significant advantage to your studying. And this is where I kind of fell into the second time pushing my test back. I realized, and this will kind of give you an idea of what I'm talking about. I realized that I was going to take my test the Friday before my spring break. And I realized that if I spent my spring break doing a couple of full-length tests, I would give myself a lot more opportunity to do practice tests. I'd go from like maybe five practice tests to eight practice tests. And that would make a difference and kind of give me more time to see what I was doing, review the material and then keep doing flashcards for another two or three weeks to kind of shore up my weak points. So I ended up pushing my test back from like a March 16th date, two weeks to like the first week in April, or maybe like three weeks. But one of those weeks, I was studying full time where before and after I had only been doing part time. So for me, that week gave me an advantage of doing three more practice tests and really building my stamina by doing tests back to back to back. Then if I had taken it early and I think this probably gave me like at least, you know, seven point jump in my score, just like ballparking it because I was more confident in taking the test I'd experienced, that sort of thing. So if you see a week in your schedule and you're like, all right, I can take off time if you're like, OK, my work slows down here. I can go ahead and take the test after work slows down. So I have this extra time. That is to your advantage to push back. If it's kind of the whole summer, evaluate if you can use part of that summer to go towards your studying, take the test and then kind of move on towards the end of the summer. That's a good reason to push back the test if it can actually help you with your studying. And lastly, like another reason to kind of push back your task for outside circumstances is say something goes wrong. You get sick for like two or three weeks. You have a family member get sick, your kid get sick. Say, you know, you just have all this work come down that you weren't expecting. So many things are going to happen and throw you off your plan. So don't get discouraged if things come up and don't try and force your test. If you get sick and you're trying to force yourself through like studying, studying, studying to take this test, not only are you going to feel bad, you're not going to do well because you don't feel good and you're going to prevent yourself from getting healthy. So you're better off pushing your test back a couple of weeks and taking the time to get right and get everything sorted out and then get back going towards the MCAT. All right. And the biggest one on this run, it's the right time to push the MCAT back is if you're not 100 percent sure you want to go into medicine. So this is another thing I have personal experience with. I was actually going to dental school before I decided to take the MCAT and get into bed school and I took the dental admissions test. And there was a big difference in my dental admissions test score and my MCAT score, even though most people who kind of you might talk to would say the MCAT's the harder test, it was well over 10 percentiles. And I really think that that's because I wanted to go into medicine. I knew I wanted to go into medicine and I was just willing to overcome kind of everything in my way to get an MCAT score that I could apply with and get in with with the dental test. I actually got accepted to dental school. It wasn't a bad score, but it was still like not the best I've ever done. And so I think a lot of that was because I just didn't want to study. I didn't feel like it. I was like, well, it'll be fine. Oh, I'll be competitive enough. Oh, I can retake it. And I had a lot of excuses because at the end of the day, my heart was in it with medical school. There were no excuses. It was like, yeah, I don't want to take this practice test, but I have to because I need to get into medical school. And there's no shame in saying, all right, I'm not 100 percent sure yet. And it doesn't mean that you're not going to decide to go to medical school. It's more about just evaluating it that you can put yourself in the best headspace possible to take the test and do really well so that when you are ready to apply to medical school and you get in, get in where you want to go and life is great. So don't be afraid to reevaluate, shout out to the med student, shout out to some doctors, talk to people, see if it's really what you want to do and even explore some other careers and make sure you are committed to the whatever you choose so that that can kind of help carry you through. When you get to a point you don't want to study anymore, you're done with practices, that sort of thing. All right. So those are all the reasons that it's probably a good time to push your test back. Let's talk about when you don't need to push your test back and you're probably having an issue like with anxiety and panic and just want to move it back. And again, I experienced this too and was actually going to push my test back the third time, but decided against it and was pretty happy with my score and was fine applying with that score. So the first way you kind of know you're ready is the the internet knowledge that I felt like held true for me was you want to you if your goal score is say like a 513th, you want to be scoring plus or minus two in your double AMC average of that goal score. For instance, I had like a 513.5, I think double AMC average. And I so plus two of that would be 515.5. So like 515 or 516 minus two would be around like 511, 510. I felt fine applying with that on either end of the range. I was good with it. If I got a 510, if I got a 515, whatever, it was good enough for the school I wanted to go to. So I went for it and I actually ended up getting exactly point plus point 1.5 on it. So I got a 513.5 average score 515 on my test. So that's kind of a good way to ballpark it. Like if you feel comfortable scoring two or three points under where your practice test are, you'll be fine. I would have been fine with 510 and so I was good taking the test. Another way to kind of look at it is if you have completed all the double AMC material and you've kind of looked over like Incat Mastery has a great checklist that kind of gives you a big picture overview, if you've done all the double AMC material, if you feel really confident about everything in the checklist, you're probably ready to take it. That means you've got enough practice under your belt, you're comfortable and you've got enough content knowledge to kind of carry you through to use with the strategy. Same thing for practice test. If you feel like you've taken five, six, seven, eight, probably closer like seven to eight, nine practice test, you're probably ready. If you feel like you don't have a timing problem in your scoring where you want to, you're going to be ready. If you have balanced test scores and all your scores are kind of in a range that, you know, you need scores, all your scores are between 127 and 129. That's very balanced. Everything's close together. You're probably ready to take the test. So say all of the above that I've said so far true, but you're still kind of nervous. One way to look at it is when is your test date? If your test date is going to change your time frame and you feel like you're here, you're probably ready to take it. For instance, if your test date, like in late August, early September, next time you can push it back is not until January. Are you prepared to study four more months at the rate you're going and make sure you kind of retain all the information you've done? Same thing, for instance, my test date was in April. If I pushed it back to late April, I'd be looking at like late May for my retake and I was going to start classes again. So I was like, I don't want to have to do a retake or like get my score back in late May and then be kind of scrambling being a class, not sure if I can be in it. I'd rather take it in early April, get my score back. Even if it's like a point or two lower, I'm still happy with it and I can go with it. So if it changes your time frame, don't push it back. That's a bad idea. If everything else I said was true and you're still thinking about pushing it back and changes your time frame, don't do it. Don't delay your application cycle for one or two points on the MCAT. That's not what's going to change kind of your whole outcome. So I say all of the above feels true, but you still kind of feel scared. This could be one, you could have test anxiety in general, and two, it could just be test anxiety because of the MCAT. And you might have it just over this test because you feel like it's such a big deal and such a big determiner in your life. So don't push your test back because of that. Instead, kind of focus on some mindfulness activities or some meditation activities you can do to kind of overcome this because this is not something that's going to go away. You want to make sure you master this now. So when you get into med school, you're OK with the anxiety side of things. And finally, if you feel like some part of you is ready to take the test, but you feel like you don't know everything, that's never going to happen either. Even when you're a doctor, you're not going to know everything. So don't try and push the MCAT back until you feel confident in every bit of knowledge, because that's not going to happen. Instead, kind of look inside, kind of be introspective and see, do I have a confidence that I've done everything I can that there's really nothing else I have left to give that even if I push it back, what else would I do to improve my score? And if you kind of feel deep inside a sense of peace about it, you're ready to take the MCAT. So go ahead and go for it. Don't kind of wait around and kind of keep pushing it back because you don't want to get to the point where you're pushing it back and pushing it back and pushing it back, but you never take it. And so that's a lot of kind of points on when you show it or when you shut and put it back. But let's kind of look at some examples number wise that you can use to give you a good idea of where you at. And this is called the best day kind of test. And you may have seen this on the Internet, too. So the best day test is looking at the best score you had on each subsection and seeing what it is. That way you're kind of taking your best of each and you've scored that if you've taken your tests in testing conditions, which is very important. You've actually scored that. So it's not an unrealistic scenario. You've already done it. So let's kind of talk about when to push back or when to not push back based on your best test day. And that way you can kind of see what I'm talking about, too. So you can use it to evaluate your own kind of study method and where you're at in regards to taking the MCAT. So saying your goal score is a 5-10 and you've got a 125 on chem fizz, 125 on cars, 127 on bio-bio and 127 on psych-stoche. You scored a 504 and that probably means you do not need to apply. If your goal score is a 5-10, the schools you want to apply to have about a 5-10. That's where you need to be. You don't need to be at a 504. You're just not ready. Don't take the test. Scored like a 127 chem fizz, a 126 in cars, a 127 in bio-bio and a 128 in psych-stoche. That puts you about at a 508 and your goal score is a 5-10. If you feel confident applying with a 508 and you feel like your application is good and kind of 508 is close enough to 5-10, I'm going to go for it, then you're good to go. If you'd be like, not sure, don't really want a 5-10, push it back. Another key thing about these scores is they're all really close together. So like a 126 and a 128 are not that big of a difference. So that's kind of similar to what we talked about, making sure to keep those scores grouped together. And finally, say your goal score is a 5-10 and your highest section scores are a 127 in chem fizz, a 128 in bio-bio, a 128 in cars and a 129 in psych-stoche. That puts you at a 5-12 and say you're like, all right, my goal was a 5-10. If I get plus two on that test, I'd get a 5-14 and I'd go for it. If I get minus two and get a 5-10, still would go for it, you're ready to apply. And so use this method to kind of help you figure out where you are and where you kind of stand in relation to your goals. And don't be afraid to push your test back if it's the right thing and use these kind of tips to help guide you. But also make sure that you don't get in the habit of pushing back constantly and you just go ahead and take the test because you can do it. And with our tips and kind of strategies, you're going to have a much better chance of being able to get where you want. And if you feel like you're really still struggling, reach out to one of our tutors because we can also kind of help you look at your plan, see where you're at and get you to that goal score. But no matter what, remember you can do it. And remember when you're taking the MCAT, your goal is to take it one time or if this is your second time, the second time, if this is your third time, the third time, but no more after this. And MCAT Mastery can really help you achieve those goals. One, this is Monica again. And before you go, I just want to remind you that if you're not receiving our daily free MCAT strategy and success story emails yet, definitely be sure to sign up for those at mcatmastery.net slash free course. In addition to that, if you feel like you might need personalized help with the exam and would like to have an MCAT mentor, look at your situation and help you identify exactly what's holding your score back. You can look into that too at mcatmastery.net slash mentors. And lastly and most importantly, we just want you guys to know that you have what it takes to succeed on this exam. We know the MCAT is intimidating and when you get a score that's lower than you expected on a practice or on the real thing, it's so easy to feel discouraged or frustrated or even hopeless about the exam. We get it. A lot of us have been there. So we want to give you the guidance that we wish we'd had when we were in your shoes. And that's what these interviews are for. That's what our emails are for. We want you guys to be able to feel confident again and most importantly, be able to see that med school mission is possible and it's not out of your reach at all. So thanks again for listening. And remember that every top score, every med student and every doctor made it through this journey. So you can do it too. You got this.