Why our MCAT program isn't open yet, and what we're waiting for

You found the MCAT page, saw a waitlist where you expected a booking button, and want to know what exactly you’d be waiting for. The program is closed because we have not yet hired an MCAT tutor who meets the one standard we hold for every exam we teach, a score in the 99th percentile on the current version of the test, and it will stay closed until we do. This page explains the standard, what the program will look like when it opens, and what the waitlist does and does not get you.

The short answer

Giant Prep teaches with one tutor per student, start to finish, and that tutor has scored in the 99th percentile on the test they teach. Rick, the founder, meets that standard on the exams the practice currently offers and sits in every one of those sessions personally. He has not taken the MCAT at that level, and nobody else at the practice has either.

That is the whole reason. There is no legal issue, no licensing wait, no curriculum in development that we are hiding behind a waitlist. We do not have the person, so we do not have the program.

The standard, and why we won’t bend it

The 99th percentile on the current exam is a blunt standard and we chose it on purpose, because it is easy to check and hard to fake. A score report either shows it or does not.

It matters for the MCAT in particular for two reasons. The first is that the exam was redesigned in 2015 and a score from before that is from a different test with different sections, a different scale and a different emphasis on reasoning. A tutor whose own score predates the current format knows the content and does not know the exam. The second is that the work of good tutoring on this test is diagnosis: watching how a student reads a passage, sorting misses by cause, knowing which wrong answer the question writers planted and why. That skill comes from having sat at the top of the exam and understood why, and we have not found a reliable substitute for it.

We have been offered the alternatives. A medical student who scored well but not at the top. A content expert who has never sat the current exam. A larger company’s curriculum that we could license and staff. Each would let us open a program and take payment this season.

We are not doing that. A student who books in the first month of an MCAT program is applying to medical school on the result, and the cost of a bad hire lands on that student, not on us. The honest move is to leave the page closed until the person exists.

Rick’s note: I’d rather lose every student on this waitlist to someone else than teach one of them with a tutor I wouldn’t hire for my own family. If that costs the practice a year, it costs a year.

What “99th percentile on the current exam” means in practice

The AAMC publishes percentile ranks for the exam, and the 99th percentile corresponds to a total score in the low 520s on the 472 to 528 scale (the current percentile tables are at students-residents.aamc.org) [verify]. We will ask any candidate for the official score report, dated, and we will ask them to teach a passage in front of us before anything is agreed.

A high score alone is not enough. The tutor also has to explain, in plain words, why a wrong answer was tempting and what the student did in the moment that made it so, and to do that without a script. That is the part of the interview most strong scorers fail. It is also the part that moves a student’s score.

When someone passes both, the program opens.

What the program will look like when it opens

The shape is already decided. It is the shape of everything else we teach.

One tutor, from the first session to the last. No rotation, no “team,” no handoff to a junior tutor for content review. The person who runs your diagnostic is the person who reviews your final full-length.

A proctored full-length diagnostic first. Not a free consultation and not a sales call. You sit a full AAMC exam under the real 7.5-hour clock, the tutor reviews it line by line, and you get a one-hour debrief that names the four or five question types costing you the most points and says honestly what a realistic target is for your date. If the honest answer is that you do not need a tutor, you will hear it in that hour.

Weekly proctored full-lengths from the middle of the program onward, reviewed line by line, with the review built around causes rather than explanations. Sessions online with a shared whiteboard or in person in Austin.

Pricing per hour with the 10 and 20 percent package discounts our other programs use. We will publish the number when there is a tutor attached to it and not before.

What we will not do is promise a score, promise a timeline shorter than the plan, or sell a package bigger than the diagnostic says you need.

What the waitlist gets you

The waitlist is an email address and the exam date you are aiming at. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

When the program opens, waitlist members hear first, and diagnostic slots are offered in the order people joined. If the first tutor can take twelve students, the first twelve people who want a slot get one. There is no deposit, no hold fee, and nothing that happens automatically; you will get an email and you will decide.

It also tells us something useful. The length of the list and the test dates on it tell us how urgently to search and which months matter, which is more than a page view does.

What it does not get you is a guarantee of when. We do not know. Anyone who joins the list should plan their preparation as though the program will not open in time, because it might not, and the guides on this site are written to make that plan workable without us.

What to do in the meantime

The free guides on this site cover the decisions that matter most for the exam, and none of them depends on our program existing. Start with whether a tutor is worth it for you at all, which depends on a full-length you can take for free today. Then pick a date by counting back from the TMDSAS and AMCAS deadlines, read the Texas school medians if you are applying in-state, and run your first full-length on the real clock.

The AAMC’s own practice materials are the backbone of every plan we would write, and they are the one purchase we recommend without reservation. Everything else is optional.

If there is another exam in your household that we do teach, that is a separate conversation and a separate page. MCAT-specific sessions are not available.

What to do this week

1. Join the waitlist with the test date you are aiming at. It takes a minute and you can ignore us until we write.
2. Take the free AAMC sample full-length under real conditions. Whether or not our program opens, this is where your plan starts.
3. Read the guide on whether a tutor is worth it and decide, from the full-length, which bucket you are in.
4. If your date is within four months and the gap is large, start interviewing tutors elsewhere now. We will not be offended, and we will tell you what to ask.