Theres actually a simple way to "cheat" AAMC on any 50/50 question.
Pick an answer and move on. DO NOT play their game.
This sounds stupid but AAMC increases the number of 50/50 questions on the MCAT every year for one simple purpose:
To waste a student's time and force them into “Time Debt”.
AAMC likes to deflate students' scores because they want to make the test more difficult. They can do this in many ways but here are their key attacks:
Increase difficulty of the exam(unfortunately do this too much and you mess with the curve and we know they don’t like that)
Increase passage length(they are capped at 600 words per passage and in recent testing years they have already maxed out in all sections)
Increase length/ difficulty of questions(same consequence as #1)
Psychologically induce students to waste more time
Students may laugh at #4 but the AAMC is a professional company built to provide standardized tests. They take all factors into account.
There are three well known elements of success on the MCAT: ability to read/analyze passage, understand/answer questions, and have the content knowledge required to do the previous two.
The Fourth hidden factor is having the TIME required to do the above three.
If you can trick students into wasting their time you can actually ruin their testing capabilities without affecting the curve by too much.
Here's how this works:
AAMC builds a good number of questions that are designed to let students easily eliminate 2/4 answer choices (especially in CARS)
Students “feel” that they are very close to the answer(since they only have 2 choices left) and therefore are more likely to spend time answering the question because they are “almost there”
They end up no closer to finding the “best” answer after 2-3 minutes than they did after 1 minute and finally give up and select a choice
The AAMC has now “robbed that student of a few minutes which they needed to get as high a score as possible
Repeat this process for multiple questions across a section to create a “time debt”(particularly nasty in CARS)
If you have tested before, the above scenario is too familiar. If you haven’t tested before ask yourself this:
If you had 2 minutes to solve a question would you spend it on one
with 3 answer choices left or two?
Most students would prefer the question with 2 answers left and the AAMC knows this. They love to disguise hard/ultra hard questions that only 90th percentile plus test takers can solve as 50/50s in order to “trick” average students to play their game.
Remember when we play their game we ALWAYS lose.
So we have to change the rules.
At MCATSavior a lot of the test taking/timing strategy we have including the famous “one minute rule”is built to protect us from the AAMC (you can get that course completely for free here). And of course CARS has its own special rules for 50/50s.
Dealing with the AAMC is a struggle but hopefully some of these resources can help!
