AAMC Exams

April told me that the AAMC exams we get are in fact "harder" than the actual AAMC exams that we'd purchase online in that the questions are ordered differently and Kaplan picks and chooses the harder AAMC questions... from what I've seen in comparison with friends who actually purchased the AAMC exams online they're pretty much the same thing. Could you maybe clarify what the difference is for me?
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I'm not exactly sure where this information came from. Here's the actual low-down on the AAMC tests (by the way, I was part of the committee involved in developing the full-lengths, so I'm speaking from experience here):

The AAMC exams you get on the Kaplan website are exactly the ones you can buy directly from AAMC. You can opt to only work with harder questions (available when you "make your own test" on the site), but all the questions available from AAMC to anyone in the world are available to you when you access AAMC from your Kaptest.com syllabus. It's the same for people buying it a la carte.

To also mention the difference between Kaplan and AAMC exams (I get a lot of questions on this, so I'm going to answer it here):

The Kaplan exams are developed to be a bit more broad than they are deep. The question difficulty is similar to what you'll see on Test Day, although the topics and scopes on Test Day are, admittedly, a bit more narrow than what you see on Kaplan full-lengths. Some advantages of this are that you will see a wider variety of science topics on any given test, as well as a wider variety of questions (both plug-and-chug physics questions and concept-oriented questions, and all question types in verbal). As a disadvantage, the MCAT tends not to be quite as even keel as that. You'll have some questions on Test Day that are easier, and some that are harder. Some topics you'll feel were covered a bit extensively, and others may not show up at all.

The AAMC exams tend to be more narrowly-focused. Significantly, they are NOT old exams. They contain old passages and questions, but are scrambled. In other words, an AAMC exam may have an August 2003 passage and an April 1998 passage in it. As part of that, the grading scales do NOT reflect actual grading scales used in the past. They are algorithmically calculated and, while somewhat accurate, tend to be a bit "difficult" compared to usual Test Day curves.

What comes out of this is that Kaplan exams tend to give you more consistent scores (seeing all the topics and question types, you'll tend to do about the same... but are hopefully improving!). AAMC exams tend to be more jumpy (if you're strong at the question types and topics they're testing on that practice exam, you'll do really well. If not, you may not fare as well). But in bulk, the two average out to be the same. In other words, there isn't a "good" and a "bad" set of tests, but you have to know how to interpret the scores and styles of each test.