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Taking the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) may very well be one of the most anxiety-provoking times of a pre-medical student’s life. Most MCAT prep courses focus on nailing the content and test taking strategies, leaving out ways to manage test anxiety. So, a group of researchers from the Medical College of Wisconsin, including two medical students, decided to look at MCAT-related anxiety and determine if there was a way to decrease this anxiety with — coaching sessions.
For the study, undergraduate students or recent graduates who intended to apply to medical school were matched with volunteer peer mentors who were recruited from existing MD or MD/PhD candidates at the Medical College of Wisconsin. In addition, the pre-med students were from Underrepresented in Medicine (URM) backgrounds.
For the first few coaching sessions, some of the topics covered were: study schedules, effective studying, and exam strategy. Then in later coaching sessions, students were coached on strategies to manage test anxiety (i.e. visit the test center a week before, positive mentality about wrong answers during practice tests, and increasingly practicing under test-day conditions.)
In the end, students generally found the coaching sessions to be helpful and felt a boost in their self-confidence about taking the MCAT. “Lately, there has been a bigger push for physicians to be more representative of the populations they are serving,” the author wrote. “The results discussed here suggest that test anxiety is an under recognized, underreported barrier that can be addressed through an easy-to-access, relatively simple-to-implement program for most medical schools via near-peer coaching.”
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