What happens if you fail mcat

Real test day jitters can get to you. It just happens. Sometimes, students score much better on the real test. So this student had a mediocre undergrad GPA with great extracurricular activities, great background, and great story. So what do you do with a ? Are you a URM? Do you play that card? Data shows, unfortunately, that because of the biases built into our system, African Americans have scored significantly lower on the MCAT compared to Caucasians and Asians.

So med schools will look at if you are a URM in the admissions process. So what do you do in this situation where you applied early and then got back a lower MCAT score than you expected? Lay out your cards.

Ask whether they have minimum cutoffs for URM students. They may consider a , or they may say no. Ask the school what to do next and where to go from here. They may tell you to go ahead and apply. They may tell you to apply and retake the MCAT. Hence, the first option is to apply.

You would need time to study and practice before your retake. Go and retake the test as soon as possible. This usually means one of three things:. These things should be taken care of properly before the exam to be fully focused and ready. Just like studying too little, studying too much can also be a bad thing. If you put too much pressure on yourself, you might end up getting sick. This can result in poor scores or not being able to appear for it at all.

There are many ways that can move forward depending on how they feel and the options available to them. These include:. A basic mistake that failed candidates make when preparing for the second time around is aiming for a perfect score. This is simply not possible and puts unwanted stress on your shoulders. Instead, when retaking the MCAT exam the second time, have a certain score in mind that you can achieve and work towards it. Some passages may describe upper-division topics, but correctly answering the questions will not require upper-division knowledge.

Believe it or not, most students who do well on the MCAT spend between and hours preparing for the exam. Control the things you can control, namely your test prep for this exam. Trust us, you don't want to have to take it a second time. The MCAT tests science skills. You don't need to worry as much about the verbal section. Good reading skills are very important for the MCAT, even in the science sections.

For example, humanities majors outperform biological sciences major on every part of the MCAT, not just the verbal section! Medical school admissions officers actually weigh the Critical Analysis and Reasoning section the heaviest of the entire MCAT, because they view it as a measure of a student's ability to learn and communicate. There's also some MCAT math —some math-based questions in the science sections that will require you to brush up on your algebra and trig basics!