Newswise — One of the biggest hurdles that college students face if they want to go to medical school is the MCAT – the Medical College Admission Test. The one-day standardized multiple-choice exam, which takes more than five hours to complete, is required for admission to nearly all medical schools in the United States. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), more than 85,000 students take the MCAT each year.

Every 20 years the MCAT undergoes a comprehensive review and overhaul. The latest changes in the test, which take effect next April, will include a new section that reflects a growing sense within the medical profession that doctors who are conscious of important issues in the humanities – including the social sciences – may be better physicians than those who are not, especially with a patient population that is ever more diverse.

“The MCAT change is a bit of social engineering,” says Carol A. Terregino, senior associate dean for education at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. “Make students read more, make them be more broadly educated, make them study the social sciences and really understand the impact of those disciplines on caring for patients, and maybe we’ll have a better product.” The new MCAT also will have a greater emphasis on critical analysis and reasoning skills.

Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School is one of a small group of schools across the country chosen by AAMC to evaluate the change – by studying the performance of the classes they admit over the next four years as it relates to students’ MCAT scores. Terregino, who also oversees admissions at the school, will lead its evaluation team.

Terregino says there is no way of knowing whether the new MCAT is an improvement until she and her colleagues have analyzed the data – and that process won’t be complete until after the last of the classes has graduated in 2022. But she says she may have a head start in identifying aspiring physicians who have these newly emphasized skills, because Robert Wood Johnson has actively recruited students with these qualities for years.

Terregino says Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School has an innovative interview process that focuses on finding students who have a knack for understanding the complete human being who will be in their care – far beyond the patient’s medical symptoms. Whether those students majored in science but also appreciated humanities, or did majors as far afield as English or history, they demonstrated the core personal skills that are needed in medicine, and Terregino says the school is pleased with the results.

“I say to students, ‘The more experiences you have, the more opportunities you’ll have to make that one-to-one connection with the patient.’ And what is great,” she adds, “is that by selecting our medical students this way I have not seen performance in medical school drop. We have no more students failing courses than before we started emphasizing the core personal competencies and humanities. Students with this added breadth of knowledge will do extraordinarily well and be competitive for top tier residency programs.”

But for many students now applying, those potential pluses may seem far in the future.

“Mostly panic” is what Bruce Babiarz says he hears when undergraduates ask his advice at Rutgers’ Health Professions Office, where he is director. He notes that students planning to take the MCAT during this academic year have had a hard decision to make. They can take the old test in January, the final time it will be given, or wait until spring and take the redesigned MCAT, which in addition to humanities will also include changes in its focus on the physical sciences and mathematics.

Babiarz, a professor of cell biology and neuroscience, says many students are unsettled by the fact that the change is coming during “their year.” “They are coming in and saying, ‘Should I take the old one real fast just to get the old score on the books?’” Babiarz is telling those students to think it through carefully – that it probably is wise not to rush to take the old test unless they are truly prepared for it.

“If you do badly on the old one you’re probably in a bigger hole than if you do badly on the new one,” he explains. “Medical schools already know how to interpret scores on the old one, while it probably will take a couple of cycles to figure out the meaning of scores on the new one. During that time, at least, the MCAT is likely to count for less than in the past, compared with students’ grades and the most important factor of all – the personal interview.”

For all the added burden students feel, Babiarz says Rutgers undergraduates have another reason to look on the bright side. The School of Arts and Sciences, where many premeds major, already requires courses in psychology and sociology. For that reason, he says, many science majors may be better prepared for the new exam than they realize.

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