What major has the edge in the MCATs?

Anonymous

You know, in the original it said “physical science”, not physics, and there was no chemistry to be found. This leads me to believe that most of those “physical science” majors were, in fact, chemistry majors. I’ve a ton of chemistry majors to apply to medical school but only a handful of physics…

Anonymous

my undergrad was chemistry and i did well on the mcat. then when i was writing my dissertation (neuroscience) i took the mcat again and got the same score as i did the first time. oddly enough, my scores in each section were all the same (12’s). my feeling was that the tests were pretty much the same except they shortened the verbal and replaced much of the ochem with molecular biology.

i did do substancially better on the written section the second go around, but then at that point all i did was write, day and night.

mike

DJS

“i did do substancially better on the written section ”
Did they grade spelling?
Well, *I* was an anthropology major and did just fine thank you.
Isn’t that Mad(sp) School selection process fascinating? Be really careful about who gets through the door, an elite club, then don’t have any sort of critical selection process, essentially graduate whoever wants to do the time,,, then out in practice only remove the license of someone who commits a felony. No, we’re a guild, not a profession, and we have failed the Oath.

Anonymous

djs…point taken, i thought it looked wrong but i guess MS Word has taught me to just expect spelling errors to automatically corrected. However, I will take my artistic license with spelling over your rambling post any day of the week. You wanna try posting something with a semblence of a point? The study didnt say whether non physical science majors did badly; they point to a difference of the means related to undergrad majors. I offered my own anecdotal evidence to support their claim.

You, however, put some run on sentence sprinkled with extraneous punctuation together to make a broad stroke accusation disparaging the medical education and profession. Your point about medical graduation is irrelevant as graduating “anyone willing to do the time” doesnt mean squat when it comes to licensing examinations. And yes, I believe that if you have been able to successfully enroll in and complete medical school and residency training with satisfactory perfomance on licensing examinations and board certifications then we should be cautious in yanking your license.

So please put that social science degree to work and construct something debatable. Or continue to naysay and nitpic, as you like.

mike

Anonymous

Again the classic inference done incorrectly. The title suggests that to do well on the MCAT one should study physics (or the physical sciences). Selection bias might merely mean that people destined to do well on the MCAT gravitate to the hard sciences whereas those of lesser capacity head to biology.

Anonymous

There was a sorting process in my undergraduate university with the sharper physician to be tending to major in chemistry or biochemistry (and a few in engineering) and the weaker or less confident ones in a biology major. In every class I took in college, whether humanities, business, or science, the engineering and science majors who aced calculus were the ones to set the curve.

I made a fair amount of money tutoring pre-meds in physics and math because so many of them, otherwise well above average, just didn’t grasp these subjects intuitively like the average physical science major. I now practice with some of these people and they are great doctors, but still think just a little differently than us engineering pre-meds.

But in medicine, what matters is the final action taken, and the path to getting there, whether deductive, inductive, or pattern-recongnition, doesn’t usually matter. There is room in our field for all kinds of minds, as long as it is backed by the character traits of conscientiousness, honesty, moral courage, and equanimity.

Anonymous

I was an economics major and got 15’s and 14’s. Given that the major challenges of a medical career are not scientific in nature, I think this was appropriate.

Anonymous

we have a daughter entering her last semester of pre-med. though she has excelled in biochemistry, she is nervous about the mcat. she wants to take a summer course to help prepare her. the cost is $1600…! (with three in college, that’s a bit of an “ouch”). my question: is it worth it? would it be wise for her to take a course to prepare her for the mcat? please advise – thanks!