By Victor Ghazi | Staff Writer
The Hunger Games on course registration day have become an inevitable experience for every AUB student. Drop-and-add and capacity overrides make the experience slightly less overwhelming, but when it comes to having to register for a standardized test with limited seats that will determine your future, it becomes more daunting.
Recently, AUB has reached an agreement with the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) to resume the administration of the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) in Lebanon after it had been discontinued for about 2 years due to “local health and security concerns.” AUB will become one of the only two MCAT testing centers in the Arab region and the only one in Lebanon. The MCAT will be used as a fundamental criterion for admission to medical school, used by medical school admission officers to “assess students with problem solving, critical thinking, and knowledge of natural, behavioral, and social science concepts and principles prerequisite to the study of medicine.”
Students were proposed a total of 9 different test dates in July 2022 (July 11-15 and July 18-21), but only 2 dates in September (8 and 9). Most students intending to sit for the MCAT are pre-medical junior (2nd year) students, who finish their current Spring semesters at the end of May. If they were to sit for one of the July examinations, they would have around 1.5 months to study. However, a reasonable amount of time required for adequate MCAT preparation is at least 2-2.5 months.
On the 1st of March, most students were ready to register for their preferred test date; however, due to the lag of the registration system, most students could not register for one of the September dates. The latter dates’ seats filled up within mere seconds, leaving them empty handed. Students struggled between the prospect of barely having adequate time to study for the July date, on the one hand, and the possibility of registering for later dates (August or September) in countries abroad, such as France and Germany, on the other hand. The MCAT is a stressful exam itself, and the added costs and burden of risking a visa rejection, booking flights and hotels to travel, and sitting for the exam in a different country outside your comfort zone is a twist of the knife in the wound, to say the least.
Faced with such a dilemma, students resorted to the Pre-Medical Student Society (PSS) and the FAS USFCs and SRCs, who created a survey to assess the need for additional registration slots during the month of September, in hopes of negotiating with the AAMC about the matter. The survey was created with the approval of the AUB Medical School and was disseminated over WhatsApp groups, e-mail, and social media. To gather information about the fate of the survey and any potential updates, I conducted an interview with the president of PSS, Nataly Harb. The survey received merely 125 answers from AUB students, and another survey serving the same purpose was created for non-AUB pre-meds, which has received 74 answers at the time of writing. Whether the number of these answers will be adequate enough to twist negotiations with the AAMC in favor of the pre-med students who want to sit for the exam in September remains still unclear. Any student who will be sitting for the MCAT – whether lucky enough to receive a seat in September or not – is highly encouraged to complete the survey as soon as possible.
Although the AAMC does not encourage examinees to travel abroad to sit for the MCAT, what would you do when faced with the fear of not having enough time to study for the exam if you were to sit for it locally?