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Newswise One of the biggest hurdles that college students face if they want to go to medical school is the MCAT the Medical College Admission Test. The one-day standardized multiple-choice exam, which takes more than five hours to complete, is required for admission to nearly all medical schools in the United States. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), more than 85,000 students take the MCAT each year.

Every 20 years the MCAT undergoes a comprehensive review and overhaul. The latest changes in the test, which take effect next April, will include a new section that reflects a growing sense within the medical profession that doctors who are conscious of important issues in the humanities including the social sciences may be better physicians than those who are not, especially with a patient population that is ever more diverse.

The MCAT change is a bit of social engineering, says Carol A. Terregino, senior associate dean for education at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Make students read more, make them be more broadly educated, make them study the social sciences and really understand the impact of those disciplines on caring for patients, and maybe well have a better product. The new MCAT also will have a greater emphasis on critical analysis and reasoning skills.

Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School is one of a small group of schools across the country chosen by AAMC to evaluate the change by studying the performance of the classes they admit over the next four years as it relates to students MCAT scores. Terregino, who also oversees admissions at the school, will lead its evaluation team.

Terregino says there is no way of knowing whether the new MCAT is an improvement until she and her colleagues have analyzed the data and that process wont be complete until after the last of the classes has graduated in 2022. But she says she may have a head start in identifying aspiring physicians who have these newly emphasized skills, because Robert Wood Johnson has actively recruited students with these qualities for years.

Terregino says Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School has an innovative interview process that focuses on finding students who have a knack for understanding the complete human being who will be in their care far beyond the patients medical symptoms. Whether those students majored in science but also appreciated humanities, or did majors as far afield as English or history, they demonstrated the core personal skills that are needed in medicine, and Terregino says the school is pleased with the results.

I say to students, The more experiences you have, the more opportunities youll have to make that one-to-one connection with the patient. And what is great, she adds, is that by selecting our medical students this way I have not seen performance in medical school drop. We have no more students failing courses than before we started emphasizing the core personal competencies and humanities. Students with this added breadth of knowledge will do extraordinarily well and be competitive for top tier residency programs.

But for many students now applying, those potential pluses may seem far in the future.

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New MCAT Fuels Anxiety for Medical School Applicants