My first practice MCAT

Even though I'm about a week behind on studying for the MCAT according to my schedule and technically still need to review a whole bunch of chapters, I decided to begin taking the practice tests now because my real test is only 5 weeks away. That doesn't seem like very long considering all the things I have to learn and do between now and May 12th. It's very overwhelming, actually.

As it stands, I've finished all the content review and just have to re-read chapters and review my answers. So it's not a bad time to get a general idea of my weak points so I can focus on those instead of feeling the need to memorize everything.

And...drum roll please...I scored a 33, with the breakdown being 11, 11, 11. While it's not a score that I'm happy with (I'm shooting for 36+), the 11 in Verbal Reasoning is incredibly reassuring.

When I first started doing Verbal passages, I was consistently scoring 7 and I was absolutely terrified because that is not something you can just cram for like you can for the other two sections. Lately, though, my scores have risen to 9 and then 11 on the last two sets of practice passages I've taken, so this "official" MCAT score lends credence to my thinking that I'm getting better.

Also, my timing is amazing on these tests to the point that I have 10 minutes left on each section to go over any answers that I'm unsure about. And the Biological Sciences section is a lot easier than my practice passages, while physics is not nearly as emphasized in Physical Sciences as I thought it would be. And that's very good because I haven't taken physics in eight years.

All in all, I think that if I had had a bit more confidence and read a bit more carefully, I could have scored at least 12 on both Biological and Physical Sciences because I missed at least a few questions in each section due to careless mistakes.

But since I have 7 more tests to take and whole bunch of passages still to do, I think I can improve in both of those areas.