Prove You’re a Professional with the AAMC PREview Exam 😊 (3 part post)
PART ONE of THREE:
When you’re applying to medical school, you want to seize every advantage you can to maximize your chances of admission. A strong MCAT score and a solid GPA can get you most of the way there, but to stand out as the type of well-rounded student that makes a great doctor, you need to demonstrate a little more.
The AAMC PREview® Exam gives you the opportunity to show that you’re not just smart: you’re a professional.
What is the AAMC PREview Exam?
The PREview Exam is a different kind of standardized test, one you’re less likely to have taken in your years of schooling. It’s a situational judgment test, an exam that presents you with hypothetical scenarios and a series of possible responses to these scenarios. Your task is to evaluate how effective each of these responses is to the scenario, where “effective” refers to how well it embodies a set of professional skills that the AAMC calls “competencies.” If that doesn’t sound too bad, keep in mind that you need to make 186 of these evaluations in only 75 minutes!
Rather than an exam about objective facts, right and wrong on the PREview Exam are determined by collective experience and wisdom. The correct effectiveness rating for each response is determined by a consensus of medical school educators, people who have decades of experience demonstrating these competencies. So to succeed at the PREview exam, you’ll have to learn to think about the different scenarios like an experienced doctor.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and stay tuned for part 2 of this series where we will discuss an example scenario and response! :)