The MCAT is scheduled to change in the spring of 2015 to keep up with the expectations of medical ?professionals.
MCAT writers said they hope the new change will test more relevant information for the medical field.
“There’s going to be more topics tested,” said Owen Farcy, Kaplan Test Prep director of premedical partnerships. “The exam will include three additional semesters of material, which actually increases the number of prerequisite classes from eight to 11, so students will be responsible for knowing more before going into the test itself.”
The exam will transition from 144 questions taken over a span of three hours and 20 minutes to 261 questions in six hours and 15 minutes, Farcy said.
The new MCAT will also update the skills it tests. It will focus on graphical analysis fundamentals and statistical reasoning.
“It’s been too much general science, they think, and not enough about behavior and social factors,” IU School of Medicine professor Bruce Martin said. “They’re putting in some changes to help the students understand where patients are coming from.”
The additional skills tested will include how to handle stress and understand patient behavior. Farcy and Martin said the concern is the current MCAT assesses test-taking instead of interactive skills.
“We’re minting doctors, printing doctors that are very good at the facts and can’t relate to patients,” Martin said. “They have all kinds of personal problems, maybe, but since they can pass tests, they become doctors.”
Rachel Tolen, assistant director and premedical adviser for Health Professions at IU, advises students exploring careers in medicine. Having had the chance to prepare premedical students for the MCAT and medical school, Tolen said the exam will benefit the students.
“The inclusion of behavioral and social science content signals a change in the emphasis medical schools place on the importance of doctors understanding their patients’ lives,” Tolen said. “It reflects a greater recognition that a person’s health is not just determined by genes and biology, but by a variety of cultural, social and psychological factors, as well.”
With the extra information premedical students need to learn prior to the exam, Tolen said IU students must prepare differently as undergraduates.
She said students are recommended to add the three courses in biochemistry, psychology and sociology, as well as a statistics course, to their prerequisite schedule.
Planning for three additional semesters of content will be more difficult, but it will help students get a better understanding of the kind of test questions they’d receive on the MCAT, Farcy said.
Martin said he feels the current MCAT forces premedical students to take too many science courses.
The new exam takes out information from classes students will have in medical school while keeping the foundations of biochemistry and math, he said.
“They’re trying to encourage medical students to be able to take a broad undergraduate curriculum,” Martin said. “If you think it’s interesting, you can major in history and just get a few prerequisites to be going to medical school.”
Martin said there is little point to having undergraduates stress about hard science classes to take an exam proving they can retain information. He said these classes will be saved for medical students who can behave in a doctor-to-patient social setting.
Martin said the expectation is the new MCAT is going to shape premedical students into the kind of doctors patients need.
“It’s truly going to generate the next generation of doctors and better prepare students to be physicians of the future,” Farcy said.
