IQ vs the MCAT: what the score measures, what it predicts and why no table converts it

0 The short answer

The MCAT is an admission exam for medical school, and no study this review found measured it against IQ, so no official or defensible table converts an MCAT score to an IQ. The exam is scored from 472 to 528, and the AAMC reports each score as a percentile of other MCAT examinees, so a 508 sits at the 74th percentile of the 305,494 exams from 2023 to 2025 and says nothing about where a person stands among adults. The exam does ask for reasoning, most plainly in its reading section, but three of its four sections also draw on science courses, and in the AAMC's own validity study it predicted medical school outcomes with median correlations of 0.42 to 0.61 inside a selected pool. Read an MCAT score as standing among people who sat the MCAT, and read an IQ as standing among adults.

1 What Does the MCAT Test, Section by Section?

The MCAT tests science knowledge in three sections and reading and reasoning in a fourth, which makes it an exam of preparation for medical school more than a test of general ability. The AAMC, which owns the exam, describes what is on the MCAT as four sections with a total content time of 6 hours and 15 minutes. The table lists them as the AAMC names them. The minutes per question are our arithmetic on the published numbers.

The three science sections draw, in the AAMC's words, on year-long courses in general chemistry, organic chemistry, introductory physics and introductory biology, and on introductory courses in biochemistry, psychology and sociology. The same page says that students must combine their scientific knowledge with scientific inquiry and reasoning skills. A person who has never studied the content has no way to reason to an answer from nothing, which, in our reading, is why these sections are partly an achievement test. The AAMC adds that the exam tests concepts that medical school faculty, residents and students rate as important, a statement of purpose that has nothing to do with a population of adults.

The fourth section is different by design. The AAMC's overview of the Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills section lists 53 questions in 90 minutes, passages drawn half from the humanities and half from the social sciences, and three skill families: foundations of comprehension at 30 percent of questions, reasoning within the text at 30 percent and reasoning beyond the text at 40 percent. It states that no additional coursework or specific knowledge is required, because what a test taker needs is in the passages and the questions. That makes the section the closest part of the MCAT to the reading and verbal reasoning tasks described on the page about the verbal IQ test, though it still produces a score on the MCAT scale and not on a scale with a mean of 100.

Adding the four counts gives 230 questions, our arithmetic, and each question gets under two minutes. A candidate also sits the exam as one step in a larger application, which the AAMC says plainly in its guide for medical schools: the exam measures the science, thinking and reasoning competencies of applicants and is one data point among all the premedical competencies required for success. The broader question of what a cognitive battery measures is covered on the page about what IQ measures, and the page on what intelligence is defines the construct itself.

2 How Is the MCAT Scored, and What Do 472 to 528 Mean?

The MCAT reports four section scores from 118 to 132 that add to a total from 472 to 528, a scale built to mean the same thing on every test date and not to place a person among adults. The AAMC percentile ranks document shows the full range: 118 to 132 in each section and 472 to 528 in total, which is four times each end of the section range, our arithmetic. The scores on the current ranks cover all exams from 2023, 2024 and 2025 combined, 305,494 in all, and the mean total was 500.6 with a standard deviation of 11.2.

The section means and standard deviations come from the AAMC guide to using MCAT data, which prints them for the same exams.

Two features of the scale matter for any comparison with an IQ. First, the published center is not a norm fixed by design. It is where examinees scored on exams from three recent years, and it can move when the pool does, while the AAMC says that a given score gives the same signal about readiness no matter when an applicant tested, with whom or on which form. An IQ scale is built the other way: its mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15 are fixed by a norm group of adults, as the page on how IQ scores are normed explains, and the page on the standard deviation of 15 shows what that fixed spread means.

Second, the scale is coarse near any one score. The same AAMC guide reports total scores with a confidence band of plus or minus 2 points and section scores with a band of plus or minus 1 point, and gives the example of a 500 whose band runs from 498 to 502. The closer two applicants' scores are, the more their bands overlap and the more likely their scores are truly the same. One point on the total is about 0.09 of a standard deviation, our arithmetic from the 11.2 figure, so a band of plus or minus 2 spans about 0.36 of a standard deviation from end to end. The page on reliability and validity explains why every test score has an error band, and an IQ report has one too.

3 Who Sits the MCAT, and What Does a Percentile Compare You With?

An MCAT percentile compares a score with other MCAT scores from the last three testing years, so it ranks the person inside a pool of examinees and not among adults. The AAMC defines the percentile rank on its percentile ranks page as the percentage of test takers who received the same score or lower, based on everyone who tested in 2023, 2024 and 2025, in effect from May 1, 2026 to April 30, 2027. The ranks are updated every May 1 with the most recent three years. The guide to using MCAT data makes the limit explicit: percentile ranks simply compare scores with the pool of examinees an applicant tested with.

The pool has three features that an adult norm sample does not. It counts exams and not people. The N of 305,494 includes every exam from examinees who tested more than once, and the AAMC reports that about 42 percent of individuals who took the exam in 2023, 2024 and 2025 were retesters. Spread over three years, 305,494 exams is about 101,800 exams a year, our arithmetic. The pool is also self-chosen: people sit the MCAT because they are pursuing medical school, and the AAMC reports that about 15 percent of applicants took it before finishing their junior year, 43 percent at the end of that year, 34 percent after their senior year and 8 percent after a postbaccalaureate program or an advanced degree. And it sits downstream of other selection. In the AAMC's fall 2025 data tables, first-time applicants to U.S. medical schools numbered 41,830 for 2025 to 2026, as of November 18, 2025, and each had already chosen premedical study and an application.

None of the AAMC documents reviewed describes the general ability of examinees, because the MCAT is not built to estimate it. It follows that a percentile among examinees tells the reader how many examinees scored at or below a given score, which is a useful fact for an applicant comparing herself with the competition, and says little about how many adults would. The page on IQ score versus percentile explains why a percentile always depends on its reference group, and moving the group moves the number without anything about the person changing. The page on percentile to IQ shows the conversion for the case where the percentile does come from a general population sample, which is the case an MCAT percentile is not.

4 What Does the AAMC Percentile Table Show?

The AAMC table puts the average examinee near 500, rises steeply through the middle of the scale and flattens at the top, and it is a table of ranks inside the examinee pool. The table below reproduces selected rows from the AAMC's current total score percentile ranks, which give the percentage of scores equal to or less than each score.

The shape shows what the percentile does. Between 500 and 505, five points of score move the rank by 16 percentile points, from 48 to 64. Between 515 and 520, the same five points move it by 6, from 91 to 97. These are our arithmetic on the AAMC numbers, and they follow from a bell shaped pile of scores in which most examinees cluster near the middle. As a check, a normal curve with the published mean of 500.6 and standard deviation of 11.2 puts a 508 at about the 75th percentile, our arithmetic, against the AAMC's 74, so the score distribution is close to normal even though the AAMC does not state its shape. The 100 at 525 and above is a rounded value, since the table shows whole numbers.

Section percentiles differ too, because the four sections do not have the same distribution. The table gives the AAMC percentile rank for four section scores.

A 124 is the median in the reading section and the 34th percentile in the behavior section. A 128 is the 90th percentile in the reading section and the 76th in the behavior section. The numbers are the AAMC's, and the pattern is the same one the AAMC states in general terms: a score is a position on its own scale, and a percentile is a position in its own pool. The page on the IQ score chart and the IQ percentile calculator show how a similar table looks on a scale with a fixed adult norm group, where a single number maps to a single percentile.

5 Which Parts of the MCAT Lean on Reasoning and Which on Knowledge?

The three science sections lean on knowledge acquired in named courses and applied through reasoning, while the reading section leans on comprehension and inference with no course content required. The mapping below is our reading of the AAMC descriptions in the vocabulary of the CHC model, where Gc is crystallized knowledge, Gf fluid reasoning and Grw reading and writing. The AAMC has not published a factor analysis of the MCAT against a cognitive battery, and none of the sources reviewed did either, so the table is a hypothesis about task demands and not a measured loading.

The line between the reasoning section and the knowledge sections is real but not clean. Gc is knowledge and the skill of using it, and the page on fluid versus crystallized intelligence explains why it grows with exposure and study. A student who has taken the listed courses answers a biochemistry question faster and with fewer errors than one who has not, whatever each one's fluid reasoning, which is the difference the page on intelligence versus knowledge draws in general terms. Quantitative reasoning (Gq) is not a named MCAT section, and the page on the quantitative reasoning test covers what a test built for that domain asks.

The evidence on later performance fits the knowledge reading. In a 2007 meta-analysis in Academic Medicine of 23 published studies of the older exam, Donnon, Paolucci and Violato found the biological sciences subtest to be the best predictor of preclinical performance (r = 0.32) and of USMLE Step 1 (r = 0.48). A subject test predicting an exam in the same subjects is what content overlap would produce, which is our interpretation and not the authors' finding. The MCAT also leaves out most of what a full battery samples: no section is designed to measure visual spatial ability, working memory span (Gwm) or the speed of simple decisions (Gs), and the page on cognitive domains describes the full set. That suits an admission exam for a science heavy program. It is also why a person can have a strong cognitive profile and a modest MCAT, or the reverse, without either number being wrong.

6 Has Any Study Compared MCAT Scores With IQ?

No study this review found measured an IQ battery and the MCAT in the same people, so the size of the relationship is unknown and any figure quoted for it should be traced to its source. The searches were run on October 6, 2026. A PubMed query pairing MCAT or Medical College Admission Test with intelligence, IQ, WAIS or general mental ability returned 26 records, and none of the 15 on the first page, judged by title and, where it mattered, abstract, reported a cognitive battery given with the MCAT to the same examinees. A web search for the correlation returned forum threads, test preparation blogs and a conversion calculator, and no peer reviewed comparison.

Two pages that rank for the query deserve a close look. A test preparation blog post from 2016 states that no data are available to illustrate a significant, direct correlation between IQ and MCAT score. An MCAT to IQ calculator says it estimates IQ by percentile matching and cites Matarazzo and Goldstein (1972) for a correlation of .60 to .75. A PubMed search for that pairing returned no record and this review did not locate the primary source, so this page does not use the figure. The calculator gives examples of 130 to 132 for a 520, 115 to 117 for a 510 and 100 for a 500, and it lists its own caveats: examinees are highly educated, the exam rewards specific content and the comparison is unvalidated because the scales come from different populations.

For the SAT there is a joint sample. Frey and Detterman extracted general ability from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery for 917 participants in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and found a correlation of .82 with SAT scores (.86 corrected for nonlinearity). In a second study, 104 undergraduates took the SAT and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, with a correlation of .483 (.72 corrected for restricted range), and the authors provided equations for converting SAT scores to estimated IQs. The page on IQ and the SAT covers that evidence. Nothing comparable appeared in the sources reviewed for the MCAT, and without a joint sample and a stated equation there is nothing to convert with.

The broader literature supports an expectation without supplying a number. Kuncel and Hezlett's 2010 review says standardized measures of intelligence, ability or achievement are all measures of acquired knowledge and skill and relate consistently to academic and job performance. Roth and colleagues found a population correlation of .54 between intelligence tests and school grades across 240 samples and 105,185 participants, after corrections for sampling error, measurement error and range restriction, as the page on IQ and academic achievement discusses. Kreiter and Otaki argue in Teaching and Learning in Medicine that research on general mental ability from outside medical education supports cognitive testing in admission, which is an argument from related evidence and not a measurement of the MCAT. The fair reading is that the MCAT probably shares variance with general ability, as the SAT does, and that no one has measured how much.

7 What Does the MCAT Predict in Medical School?

The MCAT predicts medical school exams and grades at a medium to large level in the AAMC's own study, and independent meta-analyses report small to moderate correlations, one of them with a low evidence rating. None of this is evidence about IQ. It shows what a score forecasts among the people who were admitted. The AAMC's MCAT Validity Data Report summarizes a 10 year study run by a validity committee from 2012 to 2022 that followed students who entered 17 medical schools in 2016 and 2017 through graduation. The table gives the median correlations the report plots, for MCAT total scores alone, undergraduate grade point average alone and the two together.

The report corrected the correlations for range restriction on MCAT scores and grades, since medical schools admit selectively, and did not correct them for unreliability in scores or outcomes. It states that the MCAT predicted better than undergraduate grades and that the two together predicted better than either, and that Step 1 correlations, data it does not show, were large. By the benchmark the AAMC cites, 0.3 is a medium effect in the social sciences. A correlation of 0.54 corresponds to about 29 percent of the variance in an outcome and 0.61 to about 37 percent, our arithmetic, which leaves most of the variation to other things. The AAMC says some students perform better than their scores predict and others less well, and in its figure for one school, with 98 students and a correlation of 0.61, individual points sit well above and below the line.

Pass or fail is nearly saturated. In the AAMC's guide to using MCAT data, 93 percent of 2021, 2022 and 2023 matriculants who took Step 1 passed it on the first attempt and 98 percent eventually did, with only slightly higher pass rates at higher scores and grades. A score cannot discriminate well on an outcome almost everyone reaches.

Independent work shows similar signs with more caution. Donnon and colleagues found a pooled correlation of r = 0.39 with preclinical performance (95 percent confidence interval 0.21 to 0.54) and r = 0.60 with Step 1 (0.50 to 0.67) for the earlier exam, and concluded that predictive validity ranged from small to medium. A 2025 meta-analysis of the current exam by Harvey and colleagues in the Journal of the National Medical Association pooled 12 studies of 39,413 students and found r = 0.49 with Step 1 scores (3 studies) and r = 0.42 with Step 2 CK scores (2 studies), and rated the evidence as low quality on the GRADE framework. The AAMC report comes from the exam's owner, and the sources differ in design, exam version and correction method, so this page reports each separately and does not average them.

8 Why Do Correlations Inside a Selected Pool Mislead?

Correlations computed among people already selected on the test understate the relationship across all applicants, and even corrected values describe applicants and not adults. Medical schools admit students partly on MCAT scores, so the students in the AAMC study have a narrower range of scores than the people who applied, and a narrower range lowers a correlation even when the underlying relationship is unchanged. The AAMC report applies a statistical correction, and its notes describe it: correlations were adjusted to what they would be if all applicants had been selected, with the applicants from an admission cycle at each school as the reference population.

That sentence defines the limit. The correction speaks to people who applied to a given school, a group already chosen by its own decision to apply and prepare. It does not speak to adults in general, and nothing in the report suggests the relationship in that group matches the one across the adult population.

The one comparison involving a cognitive measure shows the same effect. In Frey and Detterman's 104 undergraduates, students already admitted to college, the SAT correlated .483 with Raven's matrices and .72 after correction for restricted range, against .82 with a general ability measure in the larger national sample, a different measure and a different sample. The relationship looks weaker in the selected group, and the same logic applies with more force to MCAT examinees and still more to matriculants. Step 1 outcomes, too, are known only for people who reached medical school, so the study cannot say how an examinee who was not admitted would have performed. The page on average IQ by profession covers occupational group estimates, which describe a profession's center and not any individual physician.

9 How Much Do Preparation and Retaking Move an MCAT Score?

Retesters gain a few points on average, and the gain grows with time and further education between attempts, which shows that the score moves with preparation and not only with ability. The AAMC's guide to using MCAT data reports that about 42 percent of individuals who took the exam in 2023, 2024 and 2025 were retesters, and that most retest once. For 56,953 examinees who tested twice within that period, the median gain was generally 1 to 3 points depending on the first score, and the mean gain by first score band ranged from 1.2 points for those starting at 518 to 528 up to 3.7 points for those starting at 494 to 497. The AAMC stresses the variation: some examinees posted larger gains and some lost points.

Time and education matter. In AAMC data for 2019 to 2023, retesters who did not advance a year in college or beyond between attempts gained 2.8 points on average (36,070 retesters), those who advanced one academic year gained 3.7 (22,443) and those who advanced two or more gained 4.6 (2,255). The AAMC adds that average gains were greater with more time between attempts, which is not always tied to formal education, and that some people sit the exam before they are fully prepared. These are associations in observational data and not experiments. Retesters are also people who chose to retest, so some of the gain is expected from regression toward the mean, and the passage reviewed does not separate that from the effect of preparation.

Put in context, a gain of 3 points is about 0.27 of a standard deviation, our arithmetic from the 11.2 figure, and it is larger than the plus or minus 2 point band the AAMC attaches to a total score. Near the center of the scale it moves a person up the percentile table by roughly 10 points, from 48 at a 500 to 58 at a 503, as the AAMC's table shows. A change of that size would be a notable event for a score meant to describe a stable ability, and it is an ordinary one for an exam that measures how much of a defined body of material a candidate can use on the day.

The contrast with an IQ score is the point. The MCAT is meant to reflect readiness in specific content and is expected to rise with study, which fits the AAMC's report that more preparation time tends to raise second attempt scores, and it allows up to seven attempts in a lifetime. An IQ is meant to describe standing among adults on broad abilities and not mastery of one curriculum, and the page on preparing for an IQ test separates preparation that reduces noise from practice that inflates a score, while the page on whether IQ can be improved reviews what training moves measured ability and what moves only the practiced task. A score change on one of these tests is not evidence of the same change on the other.

10 What Happens if MCAT Percentiles Are Matched to the IQ Scale?

Matching an MCAT percentile to an IQ gives a number that depends entirely on an assumption about the average examinee, and the assumption cannot be checked with any source reviewed. Conversion calculators such as the one above work by percentile matching: take the percentile of a score in its own pool and read off the IQ at the same percentile. For an MCAT that produces a value only if the pool is treated as a stand-in for adults. The table shows what the method gives under three assumptions about the IQ of the average examinee, with a spread of 15 and a normal shape in every column. It is our arithmetic on the AAMC percentile ranks, an illustration of the method and not an estimate of anyone's IQ.

Read the columns as a demonstration. The first column assumes that the average examinee has an IQ of exactly 100, the same as the average adult, which nothing reviewed supports for people who completed the science coursework the exam assumes. The second and third columns are values we picked to show sensitivity. No source reviewed gives the average IQ of MCAT examinees, so neither is a finding. The same 508, at the 74th percentile of examinees, becomes 110, 115 or 120 depending on that one unknown, a 10 point spread from an assumption nobody has measured. A spread of 15 is also an assumption, and selection tends to narrow the spread of a pool, which would compress the values toward the assumed average.

Three further problems apply. The AAMC percentile counts exams and not people, so a retester appears twice. The percentile for a given score can change when the AAMC updates the pool each May 1, so the same 508 would map to a different IQ-scale value in a different window, while the AAMC says the score itself keeps its meaning. And a percentile near the top rounds to 100, which has no finite z score. The table stops at 522 for that reason.

An IQ is defined the other way around. By construction, a score of 110 on a scale with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 sits at about the 75th percentile of the norm group of adults, and the page on how rare an IQ is gives that rarity for any IQ. An MCAT 508 sits at the 74th percentile of examinees. The two percentiles are close in size and different in meaning, because one counts adults and the other counts people who sat an admission exam. The page on percentile to IQ shows the conversion where it is valid.

11 Why Does No Official MCAT to IQ Table Exist, and What Should a Reader Use Instead?

No official table exists because the two scores differ in construct and reference group, no joint study links them, and a table would need adults, whom the MCAT never sampled. Each reason is independent, so the conversion fails even if one is set aside.

The construct differs. The AAMC describes the MCAT as measuring the science, thinking and reasoning competencies of medical school applicants, with three sections tied to named courses. An IQ battery estimates general ability and broad abilities among adults. The reference group differs, as the previous sections showed, and it also moves from year to year. The data differ too: the SAT has a joint sample with a measure of general ability and a published equation, and the MCAT has neither in the sources reviewed. The precision differs, since a total score carries a confidence band of plus or minus 2 points, and any equation built on it would inherit that error. The page on how IQ is calculated shows the chain an IQ goes through before it is reported.

The same question comes up for other exams. The pages on the LSAT, the GMAT and the GRE cover the other graduate and professional school admission tests, the page on the SAT covers the admission test with a published conversion basis, and the page on the bar exam covers the licensing exam that follows law school.

What to use instead depends on the question. A reader who wants to know where fluid reasoning (Gf), crystallized knowledge (Gc), working memory (Gwm) and processing speed (Gs) stand among adults needs a normed cognitive battery, and the page on choosing a test and reading it and the page on where to take an IQ test cover the options. A reader who wants to know about readiness for medical school should look at the AAMC's own data on MCAT scores and outcomes, at coursework and grades, and at what the schools of interest say about how they use the exam. The AAMC says MCAT scores should be assessed along with other academic data and that there is no single magic number that determines success. Each number answers its own question, and neither should be used to answer the other.

12 What the Evidence Supports, Stated Narrowly, and How to Read a Score

The evidence supports a narrow set of statements about the MCAT and ability, and the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing say how far a score should be pushed beyond the purpose it was built for. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, published jointly by AERA, APA and NCME in 2014, treat validity as the degree to which evidence supports the interpretation of test scores for their proposed use. APA's page on the Standards describes them as a product of the three organizations since 1966, now open access, with a joint committee charged to revise the 2014 edition. The AAMC validity report cites the Standards when it calls the use of MCAT scores within other information about an applicant a best practice recommended by the AAMC and professional testing standards. Read a score against the purpose, population, scale and decision it was built for. An MCAT score was built to describe readiness for medical school among applicants, on a scale designed to keep its meaning across test dates and forms.

Stated narrowly, the evidence on this page supports five things. The MCAT tests science knowledge in three sections and reading and reasoning in a fourth, on a scale of 472 to 528 with a mean of 500.6 in 2023 to 2025. Its percentiles compare a score with other exams and not with adults. It predicts medical school exams and grades with correlations of roughly 0.4 to 0.6 in the AAMC study, corrected for selection, and less firmly in independent meta-analyses. It moves with preparation, which retest data show. And no study this review found measured it against an IQ, so no MCAT score converts to one. The MCAT probably shares variance with general ability, as the broader literature suggests, but the size of that overlap is unmeasured.

Several things the page does not say matter as much. A high MCAT score does not show a high IQ, and a low one does not show a low IQ. Group findings are not predictions for any person, and the AAMC states that some students perform better than their scores predict and others less well. Nothing here is clinical. The MCAT is also not a measure of how good a physician someone will be, because the AAMC calls it one data point among the competencies needed. Fields of practice are not addressed: the page on average IQ by profession covers occupational estimates, and this page does not rank specialties.

We sell a paid, online, self-administered cognitive assessment, so treat this paragraph as a disclosure and check it against the rest of the page. ACIS reports six indices and a Full Scale IQ on the standard scale, with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, plus percentiles and a 95 percent confidence interval, against adult norms for ages 16 to 90. On October 6, 2026, the Quick form cost 15 dollars for 6 subtests and about 45 minutes, the Optimized form 30 dollars for 13 subtests and about 110 minutes, and the Full Scale form 50 dollars for all 20 subtests and about 175 minutes, each as a one time payment with no subscription, breaks allowed and 30 days to finish. There is a free trial that needs no card and a 5 day quality guarantee, and prices can change. The limits are plain. ACIS is online and unsupervised, it is not a clinical or diagnostic instrument, it is not for hiring, school accommodations or admission to high IQ societies, and it is available in English only. Nothing on this page is evidence that its scores relate to MCAT scores, because no cited study used it. The technical manual documents the instrument, and the page on a Full Scale IQ test explains how a full battery works.

13 Sources Behind This Page

Every figure on this page is traceable to one of the following sources, and each is linked at the point where it is used. Web pages and documents were read on October 6, 2026 and can change, and the AAMC percentile ranks are replaced every May 1. The calculations labeled as our arithmetic in the body are computed on published numbers and are not findings of the sources: the minutes per question, the 230 question total, the exams per year, the points per standard deviation, the percentile gaps between scores, the normal curve check of the 508, the shares of variance behind the correlations, the z scores and IQ-scale values in the conversion table, and the standard deviation size of a retest gain. The SERP check is a record of what ranked on the search date and is not evidence for any claim.

• Association of American Medical Colleges. What's on the MCAT Exam? and Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills Section: Overview. AAMC, students-residents site, read October 6, 2026.
• Association of American Medical Colleges. Percentile Ranks for the MCAT Exam, and the table Summary of MCAT Total and Section Scores, Percentile Ranks in Effect May 1, 2026 to April 30, 2027 (N = 305,494). AAMC, read October 6, 2026.
• Association of American Medical Colleges. Using MCAT Data in 2027 Medical Student Selection. AAMC, Washington, DC, 2026.
• Association of American Medical Colleges. MCAT Validity Data Report. AAMC, Washington, DC, July 2024.
• Association of American Medical Colleges. 2025 Fall Applicant, Matriculant, and Enrollment Data Tables. AAMC, data as of November 18, 2025.
• Donnon T, Paolucci E O and Violato C. The Predictive Validity of the MCAT for Medical School Performance and Medical Board Licensing Examinations: A Meta-Analysis of the Published Research. Academic Medicine, 2007, volume 82, issue 1, pages 100 to 106.
• Harvey B and 12 colleagues. Forecasting medical school success: A systematic review and meta-analysis of the predictive value of MCAT scores. Journal of the National Medical Association, 2025, volume 117, issue 6, pages 479 to 489.
• Kreiter C D and Otaki J. Constructing a More Comprehensive Validity Argument for Medical School Admission Testing: Predicting Long-Term Outcomes. Teaching and Learning in Medicine, 2015, volume 27, issue 2, pages 197 to 200.
• Frey M C and Detterman D K. Scholastic Assessment or g? Psychological Science, 2004, volume 15, issue 6, pages 373 to 378.
• Kuncel N R and Hezlett S A. Fact and Fiction in Cognitive Ability Testing for Admissions and Hiring Decisions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2010, volume 19, issue 6, pages 339 to 345.
• Roth B, Becker N, Romeyke S, Schäfer S, Domnick F and Spinath F. Intelligence and school grades: A meta-analysis. Intelligence, 2015, volume 53, pages 118 to 137.
• Magoosh. The MCAT and IQ Comparison. Magoosh MCAT Blog, June 22, 2016, read October 6, 2026.
• Check-IQ. MCAT to IQ Conversion. check-iq.org, read October 6, 2026.
• American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association and National Council on Measurement in Education. Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. AERA, 2014; see the APA page on the Standards, read October 6, 2026.

14 Frequently Asked Questions