Know Your Opponent: A Brief History of the MCAT

Let's explore the history of the MCAT:

The Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) (of which we know all of you are intimately aware) is the rite of passage for students intending on applying to medical schools (MD and DO), as well as certain other fields ancillary to medicine in the United States and Canada. The exam was first developed in 1928 in response to astoundingly high attrition rates in US medical schools (ranging as high as 50%).[1] By 1946, attrition rates had dropped to 7%, and the MCAT was widely credited with having undergirded this drop.

The exam’s first edition in 1928 had between 6-8 sections!

These included memory, knowledge of scientific terminology, reading and comprehension and logic. In 1946, the exam was reduced to four sections: verbal and quantitative skills, science knowledge, and “understanding modern society”. Since then, the exam has had another four iterations, the last of which came in 2007, giving us the MCAT we have today. However, the AAMC has announced substantial changes to the exam for 2015—including a new section entitled “Psychological, Social and Biological Foundations of Behavior” and the departure of the infamous Writing sample.

In our next MCAT blog, we'll take a deeper look at today's MCAT has in store!