I get students tell me all the time in the interview process that someone at their school told them "SLOEs aren't required" for the DO match. While this is probably technically true, I can tell you it puts the candidate at a significant disadvantage. I review and score about 80 interviewee applications a year, and I can tell you that most of the non-SLOE letters people get are very generic. Many of them are copied and pasted. I've found several letters on the same interview day, with different candidates, where the PD at one institution just changed the name of the student.
Seeing a LOR that just says someone shows up on time, works well with others, works hard, etc is meaningless. All the letters say the same thing no matter if the student is truly oustanding or terrible. Institutions are doing students a great disservice when they write these generic letters.
SLOEs, although not perfect, at least allow programs to stratify students and allow you to get an idea of how other programs truly thought the student performed. We put a ton of time and information in our SLOEs we write.
As for programs accepting students that don't rotate, I think thats very individualized to the program. We rank students very highly every year that didn't rotate here, but most of our match class yearly comes from students that rotated here. Our rotation is pretty popular, and I think it sells our program. I think its a little harder to do that in a 4 hour interview period. So even though we highly consider people who didn't rotate at our institution, I think they are more likely to rank us lower than a known quantity. Obviously, this is a generalization, everyone has different priorties.
