00:00
The next topic I want to talk
about is the one that almost
all pre-med students have
a pretty good notion of
to begin with.
00:06
And that's what I call
the performance component.
00:09
How have you performed
along the way?
Well one measure of that
performance of course
is your grade point.
00:15
And the grade point average
is something that pre-medical
students so often obsessed with.
00:21
They are some of the most
common things as,
"Oh my god!
I going to make an A minus."
"Am I not going to make it in
a medical school?"
"I'll always be too bad for medical school," etc, etc.
00:31
And grades are important.
00:33
There's not question that
grades are important.
00:35
But what's more important
along the way...
00:38
I know people get tired hearing
this, what's more important
along the way is learning.
00:44
Grade are a measure
of your learning.
00:46
But they are not the absolute
measure of your learning.
00:49
The more you're obsessed
with grades,
the less will you do
of your learning.
00:53
Now I've seen this happen
in so many cases.
00:57
That's why schools don't use
grade point is the only way
to measure getting
into medical school.
01:02
If they did, everybody could
take the easiest possible major.
01:06
Get a 4.0 point and they would
land up in medical school.
01:09
But the schools know that.
01:12
They know that there
are grade chasers who see
that is the route to medical
school and it doesn't work.
01:18
That's why the
schools have the MCAT.
01:20
The MCAT exame is the grade leveller as it were.
01:23
And that's because there's no
way for a school to compare
a student with a 3.8 gpa
Biology at Harvard
with a student that has
a 3.45 in Biochemistry
at Oregon State University.
01:35
The GPA's just don't match up.
01:37
You can't tell.
01:38
And so you can't say that a 3.8
is better than a 3.5.
01:41
because it varies from school
to discipline to circumstance.
01:44
So the MCAT becomes
the grade leveller.
01:47
And the MCAT in a lot of ways
is what the schools see
as a measure of your learning.
01:53
And in my experience, your
learning will help you to
improve on the MCAT.
01:59
If you want to be obsessed with
something, during your schooling
that's the thing to
be obsessed with.
02:04
The more you learn, the better
you will do on the MCAT.
02:07
It's not the absolute.
02:08
The MCAT is not a perfect exam.
02:09
But the MCAT is a very good
measure of what you've learned
along the way.
02:14
And it provides the medical
schools a comparative between
the disciplines the schools
and the experiences
that the students bring.
02:21
So remember in performance
that your aim is learning.
02:25
I'm sure you've heard that.
02:27
I want to emphasize
that point to you.