The Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine is a private medical school formed through a public-private partnership between Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) and Carilion Clinic, a major health care provider in southwestern Virginia. VTCSOM will be admitting both Virginia state residents and out-of-state residents as students to our medical school. However, only U.S. Citizens, Canadian Citizens, and Permanent Residents will be considered. The tuition and fees at VTCSOM will run a little over $40,000 per year. While that amount is higher than the in-state tuition rates for Virginia residents at the Virginia public medical schools -- UVASOM, VCUSOM, and EVMS -- it is lower than the out-of-state tuition rates at those schools for non-Virginia residents.
The Virginia Tech Carilion SOM curriculum will utilize a patient centered learning approach that will rely heavily on teamwork and cooperation between the students to be successful. Our small class of 42 students will be organized into teams of seven students for the first eight blocks of the M1 and M2 years. We will be the first medical school to utilize the ETS PPI process. We also plan to utilize the Multiple Mini Interview (MMI) process pioneered and developed by McMaster University SOM in Ontario. Both of these evaluative processes are different, focusing on the non-cognitive skills critical to students in our innovative pedagogy. The MMI has had publications supporting its utility and predictive potential. We plan to evaluate the PPI in a similar manner.
The PPI evaluation process developed by ETS asks evaluators to comment on six dimensions identified as critical for academic success. Some of these areas are personal traits not usually reflected in the students' GPAs and MCATs: knowledge and creativity, communication skills, teamwork, resilience, planning and organization, and ethics and integrity. The ETS evaluation process asks evaluators to rank students relative to other students who have gone on to professional study on a Likert scale ranging from: below average - average - above average -outstanding - truly exceptional. Each of the six evaluation sections also provides a text box for evaluator comments up to 200 words. The overall evaluation summary provides a text box for comments up to 400 words.
For those of you not yet familiar with the ETS PPI process, ETS is making this evaluation system available to all students taking the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) starting in July. ETS currently estimates that 20+ graduate schools will be utilizing the PPI process as part of their application process for the coming year. Therefore, some students applying to other science graduate programs (M.S. / Ph.D.) will also be asking their science faculty members for evaluations utilizing the ETS PPI process. If you review the ETS evaluation process, you will see that it will probably take 20-25 minutes for the first few evaluations, but then the process should go quicker. We expect that there will be a learning curve as faculty and other evaluators become more familiar with the process, and we are confident that those students who make the effort to use this process will be able to provide us with a perspective we wouldn't normally get from most traditional letters. If you haven't investigated the ETS PPI process, you can learn more on the ETS website: http://ets.org.ppi
Regarding traditional letters of recommendation, we understand that many large undergraduate academic institutions use a pre-health committee process to collect, review, and evaluate their students, and invest considerable time and faculty resources in their process. Other institutions utilize a centralized university reference letter service. We believe these evaluations and letters would be useful to us in our admissions process, and we will accept those packages or letters from institutions electronically via VirtualEvals (ve).
However, it is also our goal to receive ETS PPI evaluations on each of our applicants invited to submit a secondary application. In our online secondary application, we state that, "VTCSOM requires three (minimum) to five (maximum) evaluations, including one from a science faculty member with significant contact with the student. The applicant may choose the evaluators for the remaining evaluations. The PPI evaluation report must be received from ETS before the secondary application is considered complete and the applicant can be considered for an interview." While some students may seek and get recommendations from multiple faculty members, we are also interested in getting recommendations from employers, former scoutmasters, pastors, volunteer service coordinators, coaches, etc., in an attempt to learn more about the applicant as a whole person.
If university pre-health advisors wish to assist the students in arranging for our requested science faculty evaluation using the ETS PPI process, we would have no objection. However, we would prefer that the student personally approach a science professor who has had significant personal contact with the student to get the required science faculty evaluation. Those students would then also need at least two other evaluations from other faculty evaluators or employers, former scoutmasters, pastors, volunteer service coordinators, coaches, etc., to be included in their ETS PPI summary report. Applicants from institutions that dont have the benefit of pre-health committee endorsements or centralized letters reference services may want to take advantage of the option of providing up to five evaluations in their ETS PPI summary report.
The VTC School of Medicine will be co-located with the VTC Research Institute. Our four-year MD curriculum will also have a research project component. In our admissions process, we will be particularly interested in looking for applicants with strong backgrounds in research and scholarship, as well as non-traditional students who have excelled in other fields before deciding to pursue medical school. Many of these potential applicants are now beyond their undergraduate experience, and the ETS PPI evaluation process will give them a level playing field to be evaluated against those applicants coming directly to medical school from their undergraduate schools.
You can find out more about VTCSOM on our website: http://www.vtc.vt.edu/
