MCAT Crunch

Unlike most Penn students, College junior Giselle Kohler will not be celebrating Spring Fling this weekend.

Instead, along with about 33,000 other students nationwide, Kohler will be sitting for the Medical College Admission Test this Saturday -- a test that she says is more important to her than any test she will ever take.

"For people ... who plan to go to medical school, the MCAT is it," said College senior Daniel Katz, who is an instructor for a Kaplan Test Prep MCAT review course.

"It's the end of your pre-med trek," he added.

The MCAT tests a student's knowledge of material from all pre-med courses, such as biology and organic chemistry.

However, the test -- which is a crucial component of medical-school applications -- only marks the beginning of a yearlong application process.

"It's just so much riding on one thing," Kohler said, adding that she was "definitely nervous" about the exam.

After all, the anticipation has been building since Kohler was in kindergarten, when she drew pictures of herself as a doctor.

But she is not the only Penn student anxiously awaiting Saturday's exam.

Christiana Fitzpatrick, a pre-health adviser for Career Services, expects that the number of Penn students taking Saturday's exam will be similar to what it was last April, when 248 students sat for the exam.

Many of these students believe that the score they earn will ultimately affect their entire future.

"People say that the score you get on this test is more important than your four-year GPA," Kohler said.

Echoing Kohler's sentiments, College junior and pre-med student David Hindin said that he believes students need "a good score to even be considered by med schools."

However, Gail Morrison, the vice dean for education at Penn's School of Medicine, said that although the MCAT score is important, medical schools look at "the big picture" and that more weight is given to the applicant's GPA.

"We look at where most of our students fall each year [in their MCAT scores], and we basically try to take students [the following year] in a similar manner," Morrison said, emphasizing that the school does not employ a cut-off score when reviewing applications.

But still, due to the heavy emphasis on scores many students choose to take review courses from agencies such as Princeton Review and Kaplan Test Prep to prepare for the MCAT.

Although Penn's Career Services does not "necessarily encourage" review courses, Fitzpatrick said that because of "the intensity of the testing experience, you wouldn't want to have to take it more than once."

The test -- which consists of 219 multiple-choice questions and two essays -- takes almost six hours to complete. However, with time for a lunch break and the wait to have fingerprints taken, the test-takers will be at their test site for nearly nine and a half hours.

It is scored out of 45 points, and the average score from across the United States is 24. Penn officials say that students with a score of 30 or better generally will be accepted to medical school.

Hindin said he is more nervous about having to take the MCAT twice than about the actual material on the test this Saturday.

"It's just a long process between going through all the practice exams and ... [reviewing] all the subjects," he said. "The idea is to only take it once."

Although Fatima Akrouh said, "I can always take them again if I don't do well," the College junior added that "it's better to just get it over with."

In an effort to do as well as possible the first time around, Kohler, Hindin and Akrouh are each taking an MCAT review course.

"It seemed like that's what everybody does," Akrouh said. "It seemed like it would be to my advantage."

Kohler is taking a Kaplan Test Prep course that consists of 18 three-hour teaching sessions and five full-length practice tests. It is currently offered for $1,449.

"It's an insane amount of money," Kohler said. But she added, "it's definitely worthwhile."

Kohler said that there is so much material that needs to be reviewed that without a review course she "didn't really know where to begin."

Katz said that another benefit of review courses is the practice exams.

"One thing we really try to stress is getting yourself into the routine of the test," he said. "By the time test day comes, taking a full-length [MCAT] is not nearly as grueling as it sounds."

Due to the length of the test, Akrouh said she wishes the MCAT was offered at Penn. This year the test will not be offered on campus, but will be administered at an undisclosed location nearby.

Although the MCAT is only a few days away, Fitzpatrick said that students taking the test on Saturday -- as opposed to in August -- are at an advantage.

If they are looking to begin medical school in the fall of 2006, "their scores will be available in June, and then they can go ahead and apply early in the application cycle, and that's a benefit," she said.

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