Proposal for new MCAT focuses on real-world skills by including behavioral and social science section, eliminating writing section

Preliminary changes to the Medical College Admission Test were announced last month and will be implemented in 2015 if the final proposal is approved.

The changes are intended to create a test more in line with what future physicians need to know, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Taking out the writing sample section, creating a new test on behavioral and social science concepts and revising the verbal section are among the key differences in format that have been proposed.

“Eliminating writing would be good ““ medical schools don’t put that much of an emphasis on it,” said Elizabeth Hong, a fourth-year physiological sciences student and the president of the Pre-Medical Peer Association at UCLA.

She added that the group has not had any speakers to discuss future changes.

The Pre-Medical Peer Association often hosts speakers to answer questions about the current version of the MCAT, she said.

The changes would increase total testing time by about 90 minutes, according to an AAMC press release. The current version of the test lasts roughly five hours.

A group of 22 committee members has been working on these changes for the past three years, holding outreach events for various stakeholder and advisory groups and reviewing more than 2,700 informational surveys from students and professionals.

UCLA had the second highest number of applicants to medical school in 2010, with 728 Bruins pursuing careers as physicians, according to AAMC data.

Amjed Saffarini, the executive director of pre-health programs at Kaplan Test Prep, commended the committee’s recommendations, particularly the elimination of the writing section.

Usually when the AAMC gets to this stage, there are not many changes left to be made to the test, Saffarini said.

Some, however, have questioned the timing of when the changes would be put into effect, he said.

“If the recommendations were adopted as is, the problem is people coming in as freshmen right now (high school graduates) would take this exam, since it goes into effect in 2015,” Saffarini said. “Even though the changes aren’t happening until 2015, they are impacting how students, advisers, even administrators plan for these changes.”

Course offerings would likely be forced to change to parallel the exam modifications, he said.

“I would say that the one thing students are going to have to do differently is make up their mind about the career paths they want a little bit earlier than they historically have,” Saffarini said.

The AAMC Board of Directors is slated to finalize the new exam in February 2012.

With contributing reports from Samantha Masunaga and Kelly Zhou, Bruin senior staff.