Your Royal Screwing Was Just A Fluke, Our Apologies

Cherokee  2 Mar, 2007  PreMed

A bunch of pre-meds (787 to be exact) are rightfully pissed because the AAMC just boned a bunch of them on the MCAT last Saturday.

The boning was via a verbal reasoning passage wherein the topic was robotic fish and the questions were about birds! A total of 2,400 took the test, so that’s a third who were given the flawed passage.

Of course, Dr. Robert Jones of the AAMC feels the enormously large error was just a fluke.

Not good enough. The expectation is that students have to be among the very elite to be able to be given the “honor” of medical school admittance. You have to perform reasonably well on the MCAT to even have a chance of an interview, for crying out loud. So the AAMC can make grave lapses like this and it’s not a big deal? Dr. Jones himself admits everything is reviewed in detail by several different people (ostensibly competent ones). Huh? If this is even true, it’s unacceptable.

The solution put forth is to give a VR score that’s extrapolated based on the non-flawed passages. If the student doesn’t opt for that, option #2 is a refund. Obviously both of these are horrible solutions. Extrapolated scores could mean a much higher or lower result, and refunding money means these poor pre-meds have to prepare and TAKE IT AGAIN when it’s not their fault.

As is pointed out by FairTest, a watchdog group, there are also variables such as having an ungodly huge anxiety attack when seeing f’d up questions that have no bearing on the passage. Might just slightly ruin your optimal performance.

Fluke or systemic incompetence? Whatever the case, I say let all 787 matriculate at medical schools of their choices. Why not trade an incredible mistake for an incredible solution? Perhaps only just 10% would be as incompetent as the AAMC is in this case.

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5 Comments so far »

  1. Hoover said

    March 2 2007 @ 3:11 pm

    Ridiculous. A point made in the article

    “What’s bubbling to the surface, and what scares me” he said, “is that this organization has a monopoly on the business of making doctors.”

    is absolutely true. This is the case with Step I, Step II, etc. as well. The monopoly is a huge problem, too. Just like in business, a monopoly is not healthy in the long run.

    I would like to see a class action lawsuit where every last student who took this flawed version of the MCAT successfully sue the AAMC and win.

  2. exi said

    March 2 2007 @ 3:37 pm

    Re: “Extrapolated scores could mean a much *higher* or lower result […]”

    Well hey, as far as the emphasized part of this goes, I can imagine some people being happy with it if they still scored reasonably well on the exam.

    But yes, this is a pretty notable fuckup, not a “fluke.” Silly AAMC.

  3. Med School Hell » Ceremony Hell said

    March 9 2007 @ 10:57 pm

    […] to train to become a physician! Luckily for me, the version of the MCAT I took wasn’t one of the AAMC’s special ass-raping versions where the passages and questions have no correlation, so I did […]

  4. BitBitter said

    March 13 2007 @ 2:48 pm

    I looked up the definition for “Fluke” and it didn’t say anything about willful refusal to perform quality assurance on a national exam that costs over $200, so I guess Dr Jones is a bit confused…either that or the AAMC believes they don’t need to perform to industry standards because of their “noble mission”.

    I was B-F’d to the tune of 2 verbal points because of the “tuna finch” passage - thanks for taking the time to keep people informed.

  5. J said

    March 21 2008 @ 1:58 am

    When I took the MCAT in Spring 2005, they “lost” one of my two essay submissions — this was a computer-based test, mind you — and counted it as a zero.

    I freaked out when I received a score in the ~15th percentile for writing; called the AAMC to ask for a re-grade, but was given such a runaround that I gave up. Imagine my surprise 6 months later, mid-application-cycle, when I logged in to the AAMC web site to see that my score had suddenly jumped to the 95th percentile! Two weeks after that, a letter arrived in the mail explaining that their “database system” failed, and they had mis-categorized my second essay. (Apparently instead of investigating the missing essay up front, they just decided to count it as zero.)

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