Cutting Down Costs: SCOPE Offers $20 MCAT Prep Class

Pre-meds face an early and harrowing medical school admissions experience--they will compile a first round of applications, then a second including the dreaded personal statement, and finally will suffer through a season of interviews. Costs of the expensive process--from application fees to plane tickets--add up.

One part of this process is the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT), which is typically taken in spring of the junior year and is required by most medical schools.

In recent years, many students have prepared for the eight-hour exam by taking commercial review courses, which can add more than $1,000 to the costs of applying to medical school.

Thanks to the Harvard-Radcliffe Student Committees on Premedical Education (SCOPE), students planning on taking the MCAT have another option. This semester, SCOPE is offering a low-cost MCAT prep course taught by students who have just taken the test themselves and have succeeded.

Students like Eam Man '00, who doesn't "have $1,200 lying around," can join the course for a mere $20 fee.

"I originally planned to not take a prep course because of the ridiculous amounts that the programs cost, especially for me with limited resources," Man wrote in an e-mail message.

This semester's two SCOPE classes are part of a pilot project subsidized by the College. The classes aim to teach students material they can expect to see on the MCAT, which covers basic college science courses.

"I came up with this idea last fall after becoming concerned with the inroads commercial preparatory programs have been making on this campus," review session founder Brian J. Chan '99 wrote in an e-mail message.

SCOPE offers two review classes, Biological Sciences 15 and Physical Sciences 15, "which correspond to the two sections of the MCAT in which students need the most help," added Chan, who is SCOPE's co-president.

Chan and other SCOPE organizers say they hope students enroll in the course because it costs a mere $20 and can be charged to students' term bills.

The Bureau of Study Counsel has assisted SCOPE with financial transactions, according to Chan.

According to SCOPE MCAT Review Program Director Halla Yang '00, commercial review programs often cost more than $1,000.

Despite the lower costs, SCOPE organizers say their course prepares students well. Students who have just taken the test and done well teach the course.

Michael Chen '00, who instructs the biological sciences class, scored a 14 on the biological sciences potion of his MCAT.

Yang, who scored 15 on the physical sciences portion of the test, teaches the physical sciences class.

"I was a teaching assistant for [Harvard] Summer School Physics 1b and have over 300 hours experience teaching with PBHA Chinatown ESL," Yang added.

"A peer-led review program seemed like a natural idea," Chan wrote in an e-mail message. "The best educational resources are not found at some commercial site but lie right here on campus."

To date, SCOPE's classes have succeeded with the low-cost, student-taught model.

"So far the program has been going strong," Chan said. "About 30 undergrads are currently enrolled."

Biological Sciences 15 and Physical Science 15, which meet for two hours twice a week, are both in their fourth week. The classes will prepare the students to take the MCAT on April 17.

Chukwuemeka C. Nwanze '00, a student currently enrolled in the SCOPE classes, picked them over other test-prep organizations because "SCOPE is cheaper and hopefully will be sufficient," Nwanze wrote in an e-mail message, adding that the course has helped her review old material.

"It seemed to me that many students were feeling pressured into taking such courses, either because they perceive them to be necessary for an adequate preparation (which they're not), or because they think `everybody else' is taking them," Chan wrote.

But high stress levels and the enormous costs of some test-prep programs have caused some students to question whether the MCAT is too important a factor in medical school admissions, especially because expensive preparation courses promise higher scores.

"I think standardized testing tends to be biased toward those with more opportunity. People with more resources and access to materials are more likely to do better," Man wrote in an e-mail message.

"I think the standardized test is a necessary evil, but I would hope that less emphasis would be placed on it," he added.

Nwanze, though, said that the test is particularly appropriate for testing scientific knowledge.

Tests like the MCAT "are a test of knowledge of a specific set of information, and some might argue that for the science topics covered there is no other way short of lab to test this knowledge," Nwanze wrote.