Medical School: What's a 99.9% MCAT score?

The MCAT includes a maximum score of 45, generated from 3 individual scores in Physical Sciences, Verbal Reasoning, and Life Sciences. There used to be a essay that has been graded on a letter scale, but that has been eliminated and there are plans to restructure the test in 2015 so this may all chance soon.

Each sections is curved separately, and is dependent upon the difficulty of your particular version (multiple versions have been sat in a time to decrease cheating risk). The curve might be thought of as 'exponential' with a score of '30' often considered the cutoff for "great" that many people try to clear whenever they take prep courses. That would be quite a nice even balance of three 10s, and having a more lopsided score is generally not as good, although a few points difference is nothing to worry about a 12-6-12 would likely have issues getting into a medical school unless there is something explaining the massive droop in verbal scores.

That said some sections are worse than others, the infamous verbal section only has 60 minutes to finish ~7 sections and there are so few questions that usually each point missed drops you a 'score point' until the 5-7 missed markers where it begins to become less steep. For example I just missed 2 questions on my real MCAT but that got be a 13/15 due to the curving.

So it's kind of a diminishing returns thing, it's very tough to be ideal but if you do fairly good that is just okay.

*** Edited June 2016 - The MCAT has been updated and no longer utilizes the identical scale so this response is purely historical.