I am about to matriculate into medical school this August. I am trying to decide between two schools that are both basically middle tier; one of them has Internal Quartile rankings and the other is true P/F. I like the school with rankings better in basically every aspect (and a part of me even likes the rankings, because I think it will push me as a student, but I also see the other perspective). So I just wanted to reach out and ask some current medical school students to see what they think since I am obviously ignorant to it all at this point in the game.
Also, I am interested in ortho.
I have a hard time believing the quartiles should be a deciding factor here. Look at the ortho mentorship/match. I would also message an Ortho attending on here to ask whether there's a difference. Other things I feel are more important are the clinical education of the schools in question which admittedly is hard, but not impossible to discern.
To answer your question though, a large majority of schools will rank their students at some point. Some may avoid it in the preclinical stage which I think is nice because you get a break, but then the pre-clinical portion is at least more predictable/merit based as opposed to the clinical portion which is more liable to luck/bias with evalutions. If it's part of AOA, that means how hard you work will factor into AOA as opposed to places which give AOA based on year 3 alone. There's so many factors with clinical grades too like how they're determined (standardized exam vs. subjective likert scale evaluations), etc. and how easy it is to get honors. If you want to make a table and look at these places under a microscope (how clinical grades are calculated, how AOA is calculated, etc. you can knock yourself out...but honestly, I felt even if I knew this before I chose a school,
it would have been impossible to predict which grading system is going to played to my strength. Who would have thought I'd do well on the standardized test but be mediocre in classes? The fact is for ortho you need to be better than most students however that's determined, have a decent CK score, have a large volume of scholarly work, and do well on aways/auditions to get good letters.
OP, I think the biggest thing is like you said is to reach out to students. Often times this admissions stuff plays out like "operons" in that people get accepted/rejected to the same places so ask the people at X school if they got accepted to Y and why they chose X. I would also compare the school's quality of education. The two major factors are whether the schools teach by integrated systems (organ systems right away) because that's better than the normal M1, abnormal M2 model. Also, try to gauge how good the clinical rotations are. (You can read more about this on my signature where I wrote a lot about this). Lastly, I would also look into financial benefits and try to play the schools against each other. May not work, but it's always worth a shot!
