This sounds complicated to me but for those of you who have yet to take the
MCAT I thought the explanation below might help you if you run into a
problem when you take your MCAT-This is not a problem for the DAT because
there is not as much information being seen at once as the passages are much
smaller.  Mrs. Wood-Hill

 

I talked with our IT people and indeed it is true that all 17 inch monitors
set on the same resolution should have the same view. However, it depends on
the monitors' original setting when you go in and over ride the optimal
resolution for that monitor. We have 17 inch monitors here on campus my
desktop monitor is a 17 inch flat screen. Our IT people set all our monitors
at the best resolution 1280 X1024 and 32 bit color. If I open my e-mail
inbox so I have the buttons at the top and the message lines underneath with
the folders boxes on the left and drag it so it fills the entire screen I
see 42 message lines and 4 about 4 columns the way I have it set up. Now if
I change my monitor resolution to 1024 X 768 all the type and icons get
bigger but the type is fuzzier, I still see the same number of columns
across but I only have 29 message lines. I have to scroll down to get the
last 13 messages which is about 1/3 of the original messages lines. If I
change to 16 bit color it blows things up a little more. If I go down one
more resolution level to 800 by 600 I only get 20 lines on the inbox to the
bottom of the page. 

 

Is it possible that the resolution override is not working correctly? I have
to tell the monitor to accept the new settings or in 12 seconds it defaults
to my old settings. Who boots the computer for the MCAT? If the staff is not
going around and accepting the new settings it defaults to the old ones
changing the view on the page.   Is it possible that some of the older
monitors won't take the higher resolution 32 bit color so they default to
the lower setting essentially cutting off the viewing page so that you would
have to scroll down to see the lines that are in view at the lower
resolutions? I am doing this on a Windows XP pro platform I don't know what
happens if you go to Windows XP or an earlier version of Windows. Likewise I
don't know what happens with Vista.

 

My students who had the miserable test experience in the two Harrisburg
sites on April 16 had tests that started at noon. If Prometric had given
another test early in the morning it is very possible that the monitor
settings were not at the 1024 X768  before the MCAT changed them making the
windows full sizes different. 

 

 

I played with a Microsoft word document. The same thing happens with PDF
files as the resolution goes down the view gets smaller because the type
gets bigger but the page size stays the same you just see more or less of
it. 

 


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