NEET vs. MCAT: Hardest Medical Entrance Exam?

so last week i took the neat exam for fun and let me just say wow that was a hard exam my name is arvin and i'm an incoming us medical student and i wanted to compare my experiences with taking the us medical entrance exam or the mcat with that of the indian medical entrance exam or the knee now the mcat was probably the hardest exam of my life but the neet was also difficult just in a completely different way so in this video i wanted to compare the mcat versus the neat exam and maybe come to a conclusion as to which exam is harder let's jump right into it okay so the first biggest difference is how the indian medical education system is different than the us medical education system so in india you go to medical school straight after high school to pursue an mbbs degree that means you take the neet exam while you're in high school when you're like 17 years old in the u.s after high school you have to complete an undergraduate degree in any subject and that usually takes about four years and then you go to medical school after that this means that you're usually around 21 years old when you take the mcat at least and like that's quite a big difference right between 17 years old and 21 years old there's a lot that you can learn and i definitely wouldn't have been ready for the mcat at 17. okay so now let's talk about the test structure and test content so the neat exam has a total of 200 questions of which you only need to attempt 180. it takes about three hours and it's split between biology chemistry and physics the highest total score is 720 marks because every question that you answer correctly earns you four marks every incorrect answer loses you a point and no answer earns zero points so it's recommended that you don't guess randomly when you're running out of time on this exam meanwhile the mcat has a total of 230 questions of which you should attempt all of them because there's no penalty for the wrong answer so guess all you want it takes seven and a half hours to get through this exam so more than double than the neat exam and it contains questions from chemistry biology biochemistry physics psychology sociology and reading comprehension so yeah the mcat has a couple more topics than the neat does the score range for the mcat is between a 472 and a 528 with four sections that make up 118 to 132 points each the mcat is taken entirely on a computer at a testing center while the neat exam is taken on pen and paper also at a testing center i personally don't really have a preference between either but yeah there's a pretty significant difference between the mcat and the neat content and structure okay so next let's talk about question format so this is also another major difference so the neat exam is entirely standalone questions there are no passage-based questions meanwhile the majority of the questions on the mcat are all passage based meaning you have to apply your knowledge of content in order to apply it to a particular passage or experiment simply knowing the content isn't enough for the mcat let me show you something real quick so these are some neat sample questions that i took last week but as you can see like all these questions are very detail focused right you either know it or you don't they're not really asking you to analyze anything or anything like that these questions are just testing your knowledge on science by just asking you multiple choice questions i will say though physics is pretty difficult a lot of these questions uh i got wrong and you do need to apply a little bit more on this one but again they're all stand-alone questions and so this is an mcat question right so these are passage-based questions so you're gonna see this passage first and so it'll present you with some information and then you'll have a couple questions that are based on that passage right so for example if we look at this last question it'll ask us about a pathway in figure one that we then have to refer back to here and so we need to apply our knowledge into this passage and be able to answer the questions using the information there so it's a little bit different in that regard and you spend a lot of time reading through the passages that are provided on top of answering questions for this exam also something else that i saw is that you don't get a periodic table underneath and honestly in the us i can't remember a single exam where we haven't been provided with a periodic table so another major difference is that the mcat has like a whole section for reading comprehension while the neat exam is all science based which i honestly like a lot better but yeah the mcat requires you to use reading comprehension to not only understand science passages but even humanities and social science passage okay so now that we've set all that up let's talk about what it means to get a good score on these exams i'm gonna start with the mcat because i know it a lot better so like we mentioned earlier 500 is the 50th percentile and while that can get you into some osteopathic or do schools it's pretty difficult to get accepted at an md school but it's important to realize that in the us there's more of a holistic admissions process so while they do look at your mcat they do look at your gpa or your grade point average of all your classes they look at your extracurriculars so your research and volunteer and clinical experiences while in india i think you focus completely just on the neat exam but still if you're trying to get into like harvard or columbia or the new york university school of medicine then you probably want to get a 520 plus which is in the 99th to 100th percentile that also goes for any other really really prestigious schools now if you're looking at all the medical schools in the us the average accepted mcat score is a 510 which is about the 84th percentile and again you don't need to go to a prestigious school in order to be a successful doctor in terms of neat my understanding is a little bit more fuzzy so if you are someone that's taken the need before feel free to correct me in the comments anything above a 600 can get you at the most prestigious schools in india and so that's about the 99th percentile any scores in the 500s can still get you into good medical schools and the upper 400s is typically the minimum you need to get in anywhere and again this is just what my research online has taught me and if i'm wrong please correct me down in the comments also something that's interesting dental candidates also need to take the neat exam so over 1.5 million students take the neat exam every year in india meanwhile only about 85 000 students in the us take the mcat which is still a lot of students so then our conclusion which exam is harder i mean i'll be honest right they're both really hard but their differences make them hard to compare to each other i mean the fact that indian students are responsible for so much content at such a young age makes that difficulty level just go up so much more and for like the 1.5 million students that take the neat exam there are only about 80 000 medical seats that are even available making it insanely competitive and i think it could be really stressful for kids especially at that age i also feel like there's a bigger focus on memorization on the neat exam and i say that because of how much content there is and how the questions are asked on the exam but then the longer testing period the critical reading and the additional topics on the mcat make it just as hard just in a different way i mean the truth is that becoming a doctor no matter where you are is insanely difficult and so for any of you students that are pursuing this path mad respect to you and i just want you to know that all your hard work is completely worth it this journey's super hard but as long as you never lose sight as to why you're doing it you can get through it but yeah if you enjoyed this video i'd love if you could like it and leave a comment down below and on this channel you're going to find all kinds of things regarding my journey through medical school and beyond and if you'd like to be a part of that i'd love if you could subscribe but yeah thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one [Music] this peace friends is the jankiest top down setup ever [Music]

Channel: Arvind Rajan

Views: 45,783

Keywords: mcat neet, mcat, neet, mcat vs neet, medical school, medical aspirant, neet aspirant, medicine, premed, medical student

Id: _6Hnva42E1A

Length: 7min 37sec (457 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 04 2022