Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) is a pre-requisite for admission to nearly all the medical schools in North America. Designed by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the exam is administered twice a year, in April and in August. It is a full day exam composed of four sections, Verbal Reasoning, Physical Sciences, Writing Sample, and Biological Sciences.

MCAT is a standardized, multiple-choice examination designed to assess problem solving, critical thinking, and writing skills in addition to the examinee's knowledge of science concepts and principles prerequisite to the study of medicine. Scores are reported in each of the following areas: Verbal Reasoning, Physical Sciences, Writing Sample, and Biological Sciences. The MCAT assesses mastery of basic concepts in biology, chemistry, and physics, facility with scientific problem solving and critical thinking and writing skills. The skills and concepts tested by the MCAT are those identified by physicians and medical educators as prerequisite for the practice of medicine.

Duration: The MCAT is a 5¾ - hour test.
There are four sections of the test. Two sections are given in the morning followed by the remaining two after a lunch break.

The schedule for the test day and allocated times for each section are as follows:

Verbal Reasoning

The Verbal Reasoning section of the MCAT is designed to assess your ability to understand, evaluate, and apply information and arguments presented in prose texts. The test consists of several passages, each 500 to 600 words long, taken from the humanities and social sciences and from areas of the natural sciences not tested on the MCAT Physical and Biological Sciences sections. Each passage is accompanied by 5 to 10 multiple-choice questions based on the information presented in the passage. Since the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences include a vast range of subjects and since courses in these areas differ greatly in content, test questions will not cover a specific set of topics. You will not be tested for specific subject knowledge in the disciplines covered on the test.

The Writing Sample consists of two items, each composed of a brief topic statement and a set of writing tasks designed to elicit a unified, coherent, first-draft essay exploring the meaning and implications of the statement.

The Physical and Biological Sciences sections contain multiple-choice questions. Most of the questions accompany brief informational passages; a smaller number are independent of any passage and of each other. Questions assess knowledge of basic concepts in biology, chemistry, and physics through their application to the solution of science problems.
The content tested on the physical sciences section of the MCAT is drawn from physics and general chemistry. Questions are roughly divided between the two and are mixed throughout the section. Tested physics concepts include Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, magnetism, light and optics, nuclear physics, and atomic phenomena. Chemistry concept that you can expect to see include quantum numbers, the Periodic Table, bonding, phases of matter, and acids and bases. In mathematics you need to know are the basics, like algebra, exponents, logs, and a bit of trigonometry. There isn't any calculus, differential equations, or matrix mechanics.

Questions in the Biological Sciences section are drawn from biology and organic chemistry, with a slightly greater emphasis on biology. Tested biology concepts include cell division, muscular and skeletal systems, the lymphatic system, respiratory and circulatory systems, enzymatic activity, viruses, and the nervous system. Organic chemistry concepts that you can expect to see include nomenclature, stereochemistry, spectroscopy, hydrocarbons, amino acids and proteins, laboratory techniques, and hydrolysis and dehydration.

The MCAT is a "standardized" test. A standardized test is simply one that is sensitive to differences in capacity or aptitude in specific areas and not sensitive to other (extraneous) factors or attributes. The MCAT Physical Sciences section, for example, attempts to measure facility with introductory chemistry and physics without giving the examinee a "bonus" for calculus or advanced courses taken.

Your raw score is "scaled" to a curve of how the entire group of people taking the test performed (and in some cases, how everyone who took the exam over the past few years did). Thus, your final score is based not only on your individual performance, but on the performance of the testing group as a whole. Your MCAT score indicates how far above or below average your raw test score is.

The Verbal Reasoning, Biological Sciences, and Physical Sciences sections are scored on a 1-15 scale with a target mean and standard deviation of 8 and 2.5, respectively. However, in practice the target mean and standard deviation are not met exactly, since scores are assigned to try to meet certain other criteria (e.g. a 15 corresponds to the 99.9th percentile, or there are as many 10+ scores as 1st year openings).

The results should arrive in the mail 8 to 9 weeks after the test.

The MCAT is administered in April and August of each year. Students are suggested to take the test in the calendar year prior to the year in which they plan to enter medical school.

Registration materials are available online beginning in January for the two administrations scheduled during each calendar year. For more information and to register go to: http://www.aamc.org/students/mcat/registration.htm

In India the test is offered in Computer-Based Testing (CBT) format.