So why is the score distribution so rammed together on the right side of the verbal scale? That, to me, says you're trying to get a Gaussian distribution of scores by imposing unusual cutoffs on a underlying weighted score that is a long, long way from Gaussian - more like a Boltzmann in reverse, with the thick end on the right. Perhaps I should have said "everybody who is definitely going to get in is going to do well on verbal". If you can't pull out an 8 there, at minimum, well... maybe it's time to start thinking about alternate careers.
Good luck. Nailing that one is worth the effort. When you're done, read House of God and choose your NPC specialty wisely.
I discounted verbal because hey, you've been doing that since SAT/ACT days - if you don't know how to do a verbal standardized test by now, why are you applying to med school?
Yes, but if the admissions and testing process are adequate, then they've earned it. And don't forget that there are varying degrees of prestige and pay scales in the medical world just like any other. A general practitioner working 35 hours a week at a small clinic in the sticks has a very different life than a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon in a major city.
banalizing bonhomie with the white smocks on tropical fishing expeditions
I know that this really is a popular theory, but the most valuable thing I got from any pharmaceutical company while I was a resident was a free dinner - nice, worth about $50. Pretty good deal for someone making $45k for 80 hours a week. But a $50 dinner in return to listening to them hock a drug for an hour is just not compelling for the average practicing physician - he'd rather spend the hour working, make more than $50, and eat wherever he wants.
Then I discovered the regular business world, where an acquaintance of mine who runs a small business expensed an entire trip to China with his business partner by meeting for an hour or two with the managers of the shop that actually make the custom products they sell. And where he writes off dinner with friends as "client entertainment" (because, hey, they are his clients) while actually splitting the bill with them - so he gets his half of the meal from pre-tax money. It's illegal to do that, assuming you can ever prove it - but since his friends pay about 35% less than retail, as long as it's in cash or kind, they sure won't be the ones who out him.
Practically every other business out there manipulates the press by offering journalists great free swag. They spare no expense in order to win a juicy client. And yet pharma has forbidden itself to buy dinner for a guy and his wife (unless she's an MD or RN herself). The anti-pharma forces have won: it's not a compelling proposition for them anymore. It's probably the better way to be, mind you, but let's not pretend that doctors get free Caribbean vacations for prescribing NewStuff, nor that such behavior is considered anything more than routine in essentially every other industry.
That may be true - I've no way to know - though my advice really is only about the best way to get a higher overall score. Most premeds major in biology to try to get a leg up on the med school courses (not a bad idea, really, because it does work), but correspondingly stint chemistry and physics (because there's precious little of either in med school). There's thus a slight competitive edge to doing well where they do poorly - in particular, the existence of organic chemistry in the biological sciences section made those questions extremely valuable, because they gained high discriminatory index and boosted scores quite a lot. I got an 11 in biological sciences (long, long ago) while taking freshman-level biology, just because of my chemical background.
Have they so mangled the test that it no longer works like this?
We are screening for automatons when we should be screening for thinkers.
Please tell me how you can efficiently screen for this. For current med school freshmen in the AAMC schools, there were 42742 applicants (31834 of whom were first-time applicants). There were 18665 matriculants. (Source) The MCAT allows schools to reject clearly unqualified applicants out of hand, while interviewing a group of people that actually stand a good chance of doing well.
Pre-med students are merely training for what life is like in med school, and they are demonstrating adaptive behaviors for those who wish to succeed in an environment that is effectively zero-sum: at the end of the day, my doing better means that someone else is worse off, and vice versa. There are only so many slots in the really competitive residencies, and so you either get one - or you do not.
The secret to a good score on the MCAT is to ignore verbal (everyone does very well, so the difference between an 11 and a 14 is not how many you answered wrong, but which specific question you got wrong) and know chemistry and physics cold. The Physical Sciences is nothing but chem and physics, and Biological Sciences includes organic.
Yeah, if you're dead-set on a top-ten school, the mid-30s score might not cut it, but it will get you into one of your state's allopathic schools - and unless you are sure you want an academic career, where you went to school matters far less than what your Step 1 and 2CK scores are when it's time to find a residency.
But do the schools make the place that way, or do nice places attract intelligent people who then demand that the government pay for their schooling? It's worth noting that Horace Mann, who holds a very high position in the history of public schooling in the US, didn't begin his reforms until 1837 - well after Massachusetts had established itself as a successful engine of growth and a decent place to live.
Sales ability is the key. A friend of mine has a business bachelor's, but he didn't need it - in fact, he didn't need more than a good ninth-grade education to do what he does. He's a women's clothing salesman, with a territory covering about 5 million people, and an annual income of over $200k.
Leave the MBA off your resume when applying for technical jobs. Find a former boss who's willing to stick up for you to say that you worked for him during that time period.
It is a sad reality that lots of jobs actually deny you the ability to progress in management at most companies. The most prominent in my mind was a blog post telling the story of a young man who was interested in working in insurance; he repeatedly turned down jobs as an adjuster or agent because having worked as one would permanently brand him as "not management material". The comments to the post clearly stated that he was absolutely right to do so - if you don't start work in the management-trainee path, you'll never get on the path that leads to the C level. A few people told him to go get a job as a management trainee at a McDonald's, as it would do him more good.
Those mistakes are all indications that you can't do your job correctly. They're not indications that you really need a college degree to do the job. Yes, you need to be trained, but is a four-year university education the best way to do that?
Your driven individual still needs to pick the more profitable major if he wants to monetize his energy and skill.
On average, this is true, but for the truly motivated and exceptional person, it's not. Just look at someone like Joel Osteen - and while he's the most successful one I can think of offhand, you know there are plenty more of them out there.
What the hell does the college degree have to do with taking care of people? If you can do the job, you can do the job. If you can't, you can't. This isn't engineering, where there's a very specialized body of knowledge that you're useless without.
It sounds like your friend went to college in order to improve her dating pool. That isn't necessarily a bad decision on a personal level, if you've got the money, but if you don't it's a very risky gamble. Plus, $10k in tuition is pretty cheap these days.
The article baldly asserts that if you group together the 10 lowest-paying majors (ah, already they need to inflate the numbers from the absolutely lowest-paying), they come out about $150k ahead of the average of people who have only a high school degree (which includes a lot of people who never attend college) even with cost of school and opportunity cost. That is a very odd conclusion, seeing that the lowest-paid median from TFS is $29k - you can make a lot more than that with a whole lot of non-college-degree-requiring jobs.
If you're thinking about college, and you or your parents can't pay for it up front, ask yourself what you're going to get for your money. If you don't have a fairly specific plan for how it's going to improve your life prospects, don't go.
We don't live in the 18th century. Elementary education is everywhere, in a way that it simply was not at that time. The ideal Jeffersonian society never emerged, mainly because it was a pipe dream - the pipe dream of a very, very smart man, but a pipe dream nonetheless.
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And yet you'd be surprised how many people think cops deserve respect.
Let me guess: you don't live in the US? I'm a moderately conservative middle-aged white guy with a professional job, and I HATE cops.
The only remarkable thing about this situation is that they were caught on video.
Executions are one hell of a deterrent, especially if conducted summarily.
I thought this entire discussion was about the curve-busters - e.g., those who are capable of completing a petroleum engineering undergraduate course.
So why is the score distribution so rammed together on the right side of the verbal scale? That, to me, says you're trying to get a Gaussian distribution of scores by imposing unusual cutoffs on a underlying weighted score that is a long, long way from Gaussian - more like a Boltzmann in reverse, with the thick end on the right. Perhaps I should have said "everybody who is definitely going to get in is going to do well on verbal". If you can't pull out an 8 there, at minimum, well... maybe it's time to start thinking about alternate careers.
Good luck. Nailing that one is worth the effort. When you're done, read House of God and choose your NPC specialty wisely.
I discounted verbal because hey, you've been doing that since SAT/ACT days - if you don't know how to do a verbal standardized test by now, why are you applying to med school?
Yes, but if the admissions and testing process are adequate, then they've earned it. And don't forget that there are varying degrees of prestige and pay scales in the medical world just like any other. A general practitioner working 35 hours a week at a small clinic in the sticks has a very different life than a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon in a major city.
banalizing bonhomie with the white smocks on tropical fishing expeditions
I know that this really is a popular theory, but the most valuable thing I got from any pharmaceutical company while I was a resident was a free dinner - nice, worth about $50. Pretty good deal for someone making $45k for 80 hours a week. But a $50 dinner in return to listening to them hock a drug for an hour is just not compelling for the average practicing physician - he'd rather spend the hour working, make more than $50, and eat wherever he wants.
Then I discovered the regular business world, where an acquaintance of mine who runs a small business expensed an entire trip to China with his business partner by meeting for an hour or two with the managers of the shop that actually make the custom products they sell. And where he writes off dinner with friends as "client entertainment" (because, hey, they are his clients) while actually splitting the bill with them - so he gets his half of the meal from pre-tax money. It's illegal to do that, assuming you can ever prove it - but since his friends pay about 35% less than retail, as long as it's in cash or kind, they sure won't be the ones who out him.
Practically every other business out there manipulates the press by offering journalists great free swag. They spare no expense in order to win a juicy client. And yet pharma has forbidden itself to buy dinner for a guy and his wife (unless she's an MD or RN herself). The anti-pharma forces have won: it's not a compelling proposition for them anymore. It's probably the better way to be, mind you, but let's not pretend that doctors get free Caribbean vacations for prescribing NewStuff, nor that such behavior is considered anything more than routine in essentially every other industry.
That may be true - I've no way to know - though my advice really is only about the best way to get a higher overall score. Most premeds major in biology to try to get a leg up on the med school courses (not a bad idea, really, because it does work), but correspondingly stint chemistry and physics (because there's precious little of either in med school). There's thus a slight competitive edge to doing well where they do poorly - in particular, the existence of organic chemistry in the biological sciences section made those questions extremely valuable, because they gained high discriminatory index and boosted scores quite a lot. I got an 11 in biological sciences (long, long ago) while taking freshman-level biology, just because of my chemical background.
Have they so mangled the test that it no longer works like this?
We are screening for automatons when we should be screening for thinkers.
Please tell me how you can efficiently screen for this. For current med school freshmen in the AAMC schools, there were 42742 applicants (31834 of whom were first-time applicants). There were 18665 matriculants. (Source) The MCAT allows schools to reject clearly unqualified applicants out of hand, while interviewing a group of people that actually stand a good chance of doing well.
Pre-med students are merely training for what life is like in med school, and they are demonstrating adaptive behaviors for those who wish to succeed in an environment that is effectively zero-sum: at the end of the day, my doing better means that someone else is worse off, and vice versa. There are only so many slots in the really competitive residencies, and so you either get one - or you do not.
TL;DR: don't hate the player, hate the game.
The long tail of what?
Once you're acing physical sciences, you can turn to biological as the next most valuable study area. Or don't you believe in using time wisely?
The secret to a good score on the MCAT is to ignore verbal (everyone does very well, so the difference between an 11 and a 14 is not how many you answered wrong, but which specific question you got wrong) and know chemistry and physics cold. The Physical Sciences is nothing but chem and physics, and Biological Sciences includes organic.
Yeah, if you're dead-set on a top-ten school, the mid-30s score might not cut it, but it will get you into one of your state's allopathic schools - and unless you are sure you want an academic career, where you went to school matters far less than what your Step 1 and 2CK scores are when it's time to find a residency.
But do the schools make the place that way, or do nice places attract intelligent people who then demand that the government pay for their schooling? It's worth noting that Horace Mann, who holds a very high position in the history of public schooling in the US, didn't begin his reforms until 1837 - well after Massachusetts had established itself as a successful engine of growth and a decent place to live.
Sales ability is the key. A friend of mine has a business bachelor's, but he didn't need it - in fact, he didn't need more than a good ninth-grade education to do what he does. He's a women's clothing salesman, with a territory covering about 5 million people, and an annual income of over $200k.
Leave the MBA off your resume when applying for technical jobs. Find a former boss who's willing to stick up for you to say that you worked for him during that time period.
It is a sad reality that lots of jobs actually deny you the ability to progress in management at most companies. The most prominent in my mind was a blog post telling the story of a young man who was interested in working in insurance; he repeatedly turned down jobs as an adjuster or agent because having worked as one would permanently brand him as "not management material". The comments to the post clearly stated that he was absolutely right to do so - if you don't start work in the management-trainee path, you'll never get on the path that leads to the C level. A few people told him to go get a job as a management trainee at a McDonald's, as it would do him more good.
Those mistakes are all indications that you can't do your job correctly. They're not indications that you really need a college degree to do the job. Yes, you need to be trained, but is a four-year university education the best way to do that?
Your driven individual still needs to pick the more profitable major if he wants to monetize his energy and skill.
On average, this is true, but for the truly motivated and exceptional person, it's not. Just look at someone like Joel Osteen - and while he's the most successful one I can think of offhand, you know there are plenty more of them out there.
What the hell does the college degree have to do with taking care of people? If you can do the job, you can do the job. If you can't, you can't. This isn't engineering, where there's a very specialized body of knowledge that you're useless without.
You'd better pick up a minor in business for that grow op you're learning how to run.
It sounds like your friend went to college in order to improve her dating pool. That isn't necessarily a bad decision on a personal level, if you've got the money, but if you don't it's a very risky gamble. Plus, $10k in tuition is pretty cheap these days.
You are in a vocational school - for academics.
The article baldly asserts that if you group together the 10 lowest-paying majors (ah, already they need to inflate the numbers from the absolutely lowest-paying), they come out about $150k ahead of the average of people who have only a high school degree (which includes a lot of people who never attend college) even with cost of school and opportunity cost. That is a very odd conclusion, seeing that the lowest-paid median from TFS is $29k - you can make a lot more than that with a whole lot of non-college-degree-requiring jobs.
If you're thinking about college, and you or your parents can't pay for it up front, ask yourself what you're going to get for your money. If you don't have a fairly specific plan for how it's going to improve your life prospects, don't go.
It tends to foster research and, therefore, keeps the country competitive business-wise.
Which is to say, it makes the country richer.
We don't live in the 18th century. Elementary education is everywhere, in a way that it simply was not at that time. The ideal Jeffersonian society never emerged, mainly because it was a pipe dream - the pipe dream of a very, very smart man, but a pipe dream nonetheless.
Healthcare in general is a good example of this.