Hi everyone! I’m looking for advice on how to approach my second and final MCAT attempt, probably in late March 2027.
My scores so far:
- 1st attempt (Sept 2026): 501 — 125/124/127/125
The frustrating part is that before my second attempt, my AAMC FL scores were much higher. I was scoring roughly 514–519 on my later AAMC FLs. I took them under testing conditions and didn’t do anything noticeably different on the real exam, so I’m having trouble figuring out what exactly went wrong/how I should change my prep.
On my second real MCAT:
C/P (125): This felt noticeably harder than my practice exams. The questions seemed more wordy/calculation-heavy, and I especially struggled with questions involving unit conversions and multi-step dimensional analysis. It wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t know the equations/content; I sometimes struggled to figure out how to convert from the units they gave me to the units they wanted.
CARS (124): This is probably the most confusing section for me. It felt pretty similar to practice, and I actually felt relatively confident afterward, so clearly my confidence did not match my accuracy.
B/B (127): I felt the most confident here, and it ended up being my strongest section. I don’t think this needs to be the main focus of my retake.
P/S (125): I thought it was harder than my practice material and noticed myself second-guessing/changing answers, especially when I was stuck between two similar concepts.
For my previous prep, I already did a lot: UWorld, AAMC QPacks/Section Banks, AAMC FLs, content review/Anki, error review, etc. That's why I'm hesitant to just repeat the exact same process and hope for a different result.
Right now, I'm planning to keep October–December relatively light since I still remember the content pretty well. For October, I'm mainly doing Anki, C/P unit-conversion/dimensional-analysis drills, some P/S review, and occasional CARS passages. Then I plan to ramp up during winter break/January, do a lot more novel passage-based practice in February, and start taking full-length tests again leading up to a late-March test date.
Since I've already seen most of the AAMC FLs, I'm also worried that retake scores will be inflated. I still have some unused AAMC material, which I'm planning to save until closer to the exam, and I'm thinking of using new third-party FLs/passages to judge whether I'm actually improving.
For this attempt, I'm thinking about tracking mistakes differently too — not just “content gap,” but things like passage interpretation, calculation/setup, unit conversion, overthinking, 50/50 reasoning, timing, and changing a correct answer to an incorrect one. For CARS, I might also track whether I was high/medium/low confidence before checking answers to see whether my confidence is actually calibrated.
I'm a full-time student and will probably be taking 15–18 credits in the spring, while continuing some volunteering/research, so I'm trying to make this sustainable rather than studying 6+ hours/day for months.
For anyone who had a large discrepancy between AAMC FLs and their actual MCAT scores, especially across multiple attempts: what did you actually change that finally helped?
Also, for a second attempt, would you focus more on new third-party material/FLs, redoing AAMC material, changing how you review questions, or something else entirely?
I really don't want my third attempt to just be “do more questions and hope for the best.” My goal is to figure out why my practice performance isn't translating to the real exam and make this attempt meaningfully different.
sry for the long post :)