No, the AAMC doesn’t make you write actual essays( although you might be able to with our personal statement writing course). What they actually do is set up the passage order in a way to maximize student stress by increasing time pressure and mental exhaustion.
To understand this we have to realize that the AAMC has been deflating scores(this is because students have been scoring ridiculously higher than average in recent years and their non linear grading scale has to be manipulated to maintain accuracy).
But of course they can’t just crank up the difficulty by 1000% because that would destroy their score distribution so they rely on a combination of tricks. Some of these include rigged 50/50 questions and changing passage styles (in P/S and CARS especially). These help even out the curve without destroying it.
The most subtle trick they have is baking psychological warfare elements into the design of the exam itself and this is where the passage order becomes significant.
The order of the MCAT sections is not an accident
and NEITHER is the order of the passages
Have you ever taken a FL test(real or practice) and in the middle of a section thought “wow this passage is insanely hard” and moved on to the next passage and found it was the easiest passage you have done in your life?
If so, you are not alone. The feeling of being “blocked” on an exam by a certain passage is common to nearly every test taker and it’s driven by AAMC’s testing design.
It’s particularly frustrating when you have already read the passage and are sitting there looking at 4 seemingly impossible questions and debating whether you should burn more time to solve them or move on and lose points.( This dilemma is why students real scores look so different from practices)
It's like we are in a lose-lose situation, but here's how to avoid it.
The MCAT is built as a time based standardized test. It’s grading you not only on how smart you are but how smart you are within a time limit. (and of course failure to follow timing rules leads to severe consequences).
In C/P, B/B, and P/S the passages have a distinct gradient from easy to hard. Easy passages take less time and hard passages take more.(you can get the full explanation from the free section specific strategy course here). CARS has its own rules which are similar but we discuss them separately.
“Ok that's obvious, why would I care?” It's because AAMC knows it's so obvious that student’s forget about it and they use this to their advantage.
Let's say theoretically an Easy passage takes 6 min, medium takes 8, and a hard takes 12. And in this example every passage has the same amount of questions(we are going to ignore discrete questions to make it simpler)
Given 95 minutes for the exam if your exam looks like this:
Passage # |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
Passage difficulty: |
E |
H |
M |
E |
H |
M |
E |
H |
M |
M |
You will finish the exam in 92 minutes which gives you 3 minutes to spare. PHEW. barely made it.
But as we know nothing on test day works like we theoretically want it to, so lets say AAMC shook a magic 8 ball and for some reason everyone taking the exam on your test day now has only 47.5 minutes for every section(not CARS though you get full time there because they want you to suffer).
If we use the same theoretical timing rules for the passage in the allotted time we can finish this much.
Passage # |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
Passage difficulty: |
E |
H |
M |
E |
H |
M |
E |
H |
M |
M |
It takes us about 44 minutes to do the first 5 passages and we start passage 6 right before time is called. This is good but what if we didn’t fall for the AAMCs passage order?
What if we rearranged the AAMC passage order to
maximize our testing capabilities?
Let's use the same theoretical timing rules but rearrange the passages a little.
Passage # |
1 |
4 |
7 |
3 |
6 |
9 |
10 |
2 |
5 |
8 |
Passage difficulty: |
E |
E |
E |
M |
M |
M |
M |
H |
H |
H |
Once we rearranged the passages even with the SAME time limit (half of the time we normally get) we were able to do more passages and hopefully secure more points. (we also had 5.5 minutes left after passage 10 so we might even have gotten a point from passage 10). Simple timing strategy can have that much of an effect. There is no rule stating passages have to be done in order of appearance.
As you can see here the AAMC is not your friend. The order of passages is NOT an accident.
AAMC has an increasing trend of “front-loading”
medium/hard passage to the beginning of the exam
to not only exhaust students but drastically reduce
their overall time right from the start.
When you burn time the time pressure increases which leads to speeding and lowers your accuracy. Now if you email the AAMC and ask them if they are “rigging” the passages they will say “no, of course not, passage order is fully random”.
Ask your friend who just took an actual exam what they think and you will probably get a better idea of the situation.
Every point on this exam is worth the same regardless of whether it's a hard, medium, or easy question. For average students, to maximize our skills we need to be 2 steps ahead of the AAMC’s tricks and manipulate the exam to fit us. If we follow the passage order blindly we will be falling into their trap. Naturally intelligent students can get away with not using countermeasures like this for a wide variety of reasons, but we can't.
That being said, the skills needed to properly identify passage difficulty and rearrange them quickly are tough to learn but not impossible for hard working students. You can find a complete explanation of these “passage dancing” skills here in our free strategy course.
As always we hope this information helps shed a light on the AAMC and that students can use it to help give themselves an edge on test day!
