The duration, scope and strictness of the MCAT exam even make the students with excellent academic performance find it difficult. Medical college admissions experts say that preparatory doctors who get good grades in universities think that they can easily get high marks in the medical college entrance examination or MCAT, then they are really wrong. Let's find out why.

The MCAT exam is more difficult than the traditional college entrance examination, on the one hand, because MCAT is a comprehensive and interdisciplinary exam, covering many scientific disciplines, such as biology, physics and chemistry. In addition to testing scientific knowledge, MCAT also tests oral skills by asking prospective doctors to read and explain social science and humanities paragraphs.

MCAT is also much longer than the typical college final exam. For candidates who take advantage of the optional rest time between different parts of the exam, it lasts about seven and a half hours. Experts also warned that the exam is more like a marathon than a sprint, and getting excellent MCAT results requires intellectual endurance.

Another challenging aspect of MCAT is that it aims to determine whether students have absorbed the complex details of technical fields such as organic chemistry or biochemistry. In addition, MCAT is concept-centered, and information recall is usually not enough to provide correct answers to MCAT questions, although memory may help doctors to answer some MCAT questions quickly. Experts emphasize that remembering the facts of undergraduate science courses will not automatically get high marks, because MCAT requires students to use the concepts taught in these courses to solve problems and show their mastery of preparatory courses.

Petros Minasi Jr, director of Kaplan Test Prep premedical program, said that the founder of MCAT test "won't reward you for knowing something". "They will reward you for knowing something and being able to apply it. This is how you answered the question correctly. "

Minas said that MCAT emphasizes that the purpose of solving and analyzing problems is to reveal whether an aspiring doctor has strong critical thinking ability. Because doctors' work usually involves medical patients who have been diagnosed with a long list of symptoms, experts say preschool doctors must prove that they can recognize patterns. Danielle Purtell, a first-year medical student at tulane university Medical College in New Orleans, said that MCAT questions often bombard testers with a series of facts, including important information and irrelevant details. She said that the job of MCAT candidates is to determine which facts are important and which are irrelevant.

Purtell said that the same problem-finding skills can be applied to clinical diagnosis courses. "Patients give you a lot of things you don't need, so you have to read between different lines to collect important and unimportant things," she said. She added that it is prudent for pre-doctors to focus on science subjects that they are not good at in college. The knowledge gap of a science subject will not only affect the ability of preparatory students to answer the MCAT questions of this subject, but also limit their chances of obtaining correct answers to interdisciplinary MCAT questions.

Experts warn that when preparing for the MCAT exam, it is unwise for preparatory doctors who have the ability to fill in the final exam of the university and get an "A" in the final exam to try this strategy. Purtell suggested that preparatory doctors arrange their MCAT test dates several months in advance and consider their actual expected study time each week. She also suggested taking the MCAT preparatory course.

Dr. McGregor Crowley, a pediatrician with a medical degree from Harvard Medical School and an admissions consultant from IvyWise, said that preparatory doctors usually spend several months preparing for MCAT and use various preparation skills, such as taking practical exams, enrolling in preparatory courses and using question banks. Crowley said in an email: "The key point of the exam is that it tests specific and advanced knowledge about a certain topic, and it is extensive, because candidates must understand various materials from seemingly different topics." "If anything, it's more like a cumulative exam, a college course that has been tested for many years," he said.