Aspiring doctors’ admission process to medical school may be different from what they thought.
The 2015 MCAT will include the addition of social and behavioral sciences, advanced concepts in biochemistry and more critical thinking, making it more than an hour longer.
The changes may affect the process of medical schools that rely heavily on MCAT results, but for UF College of Medicine’s admissions, the test will remain only a small portion of a student’s evaluation.
Leila Amiri, director of admissions for UF’s College of Medicine, said it is not changing its admissions prerequisites, and she does not think students should be too concerned about the changes or the length of the test.
“A test is one snapshot of a person’s performance,” she said.
Owen Farcy, director of pre-health programs for Kaplan Test Prep, said the changes will take effect in March 2015, making this year’s freshmen the first students impacted.
“Medical schools are recognizing the role of the physician is changing, and the skills that students need to be coming in with are changing as well,” he said.
Farcy said the reason the MCAT is so important is that it has traditionally been seen as a predictor of students’ success in medical school.
He said the AAMC, the company that writes and administers the test, realized its science content was outdated. The last revision of the MCAT was in 1991, and a lot has happened in the past 20 years regarding changes in medical science.
“Medicine is an extremely dynamic field, and there are advances happening every year,” Farcy said. “Many of those advances and changes will hopefully be included in some way, shape or form on the MCAT itself.”
However, Amiri said, UF’s College of Medicine will continue using the exam results the same way.
“We are not expecting this test to be a miracle device for us to be able to find the qualified versus the less qualified students,” she said.
Amiri said that when screening candidates for interviews, about 40 percent of their ranking is based on metrics.
She said UF gets about 3,000 applications and has about 117 spots to fill.
“We have such a small number of students that we can accept anyway,” she said. “We could never allow a test to identify who we would want to accept as a student.”
Farcy said pre-med students will not only have to spend an extra hour taking the test, but they will also have to dedicate extra hours of preparation for the recently approved changes.
Kaia Bednar, an 18-year-old health science freshman at UF, said she won’t let the new version of the test stand in her way.
“It’s always been my goal to be a doctor, so I don’t think the MCAT is going to change my decision,” Bednar said.
Amiri said the changes will initially be an adjustment for the admissions office.
She said it will be difficult to predict students’ success based on their test scores because the meaning of the results will be unclear at first.
But the office is excited about the changes, she said, and the new MCAT will be more holistic.
Exploratory freshman Jordan Hayes, 19, said he hopes to attend UF’s College of Medicine, and the extra work and effort will be worthwhile if it means he will be more prepared once he’s in medical school.
“What’s another hour on an exam?” he said. “I’ve kind of accepted that it’s going to be a long road regardless, so it’s just a matter of getting through it.”
