www.wsj.com
“Don't reach for the halo too soon. You have plenty of time to enjoy yourself, even a little maliciously sometimes, before you settle down to being a saint.”I can see it now; my school will issue a press release reporting that it has climbed 4 places in the rankings, before the rankings even come out.
I suppose they will de-emphasize stats.
I missed the mark by applying this cycle then, as someone with mediocre MCAT (relative to the top echelon) but an excellent holistic application. I think it represents a trend with Step 1 going pass/fail to emphasize a more holistic practitioner of medicine—someone dedicated to their community and research—which I appreciate, as someone driven by his passions and not so much by maximizing points on tests. Still, although I deprioritized it myself, I think the MCAT is important. After all, it tests decision making, planning, and critical thinking—and offers an opportunity for students who didn’t have the resources for a holistic application. I had a thousand something volunteer hours in undergrad, which wouldn’t be possible without coming from a relatively affluent family. I worry that de-emphasizing stats would just make the application process more opaque and do the opposite of bring equality. After all, the most impressive holistic applications have access to opportunities and resources. Generally, that’s associated with wealth.
A good clinician needs to have a good fund of knowledge and strong willingness to help others. I don't think we should de-emphasize either of them. The problem here is that a good fund of knowledge can be quantified but strong willingness to help others can't. So you basically are left with a classic conundrum of not being able to combine two sets of variables due to incongruity of measurement. I guess at the of the day, they decide to choose the latter at the expense of the former. Very soon, you will end up with doctors who are so compassionate but so lacking in their fundamental knowledge of what medicine really is really about.
Isn’t compassion what medicine is really about? I doubt that someone with a 526 is necessarily going to know so much more and improve the outcomes of their patients so much more than someone with a 515. But I bet someone with a 515 with years of serving their underfunded community with empathy will make a better doctor. After all, a doctor can know everything but if he can’t communicate his knowledge effectively to his or her patients, it’s going to mean jack. I think, additionally, with the emergence of general artificial intelligence in the coming decades, the less quantifiable measures of what makes a good doctor takes precedence. When a machine can diagnose as effectively as a doctor can, the purpose of the role will change. Maybe for the better. The thing that drew me to medicine, after all, is that it’s more than just cold science.
It's really about the ability to retain information (MCAT is basically a test of memory retention and retrieval). As I said, I think both are indispensable qualities, compassion and knowledge.
Whatever do you mean?
Can't imagine that it will have any effect. These are the Top Schools in the US, after all, and there's not a shortage of top students, either.
There will be no significant changes unless they adopt PREview or Casper, but that is unrelated to USNWR.
@Mr.Smile12 This makes sense to me. I find it interesting that there seems to be a prevailing “wisdom” that the 526ers aren’t compassionate or altruistic. Is it really that binary? Really smart= bad people skills?? I suspect that the bad people skills are distributed rather evenly…. But just my opinion - what happens in real life admissions??
I suspect that this faulty association is a remnant of bad faculty experiences with their peers when they were students. Or as faculty teaching students. Very bad sampling bias. (Noting that in "our day" they were just 36ers.)
Not so in my experience. One of the most impressive applicants I can recall was born to a teen mom, joined the military out of HS, had nearly a 4.0 in engineering from a service academy, successful completion of the years of service required after graduation and a respectable but not overly impressive MCAT. Got admitted to every school that interviewed him including some of the most coveted in the country.
What happens in real life admissions is that people with the highest metrics get admitted at the highest rate. Just look at Table A-23. Applicants with MCAT scores >517 and GPAs >3.79 have an admission rate of 83.2%, more than twice the overall rate of 41.2%.
I see. It seems like the people that win in this are nontraditionals versus traditional students who have more amazing stories to tell, which honestly sounds like a win. Best doctors I ever had were ex-military or had a career beforehand (one was even a folk poet for ten years in Europe).
To your point, if the rankings do fully collapse, it's not going to change Harvard, Penn, Stanford, Columbia, etc. Those places can coast on their existing status and achievements in perpetuity.
Oh, I know
HMS will always have a good rep.
I have no doubt that the USNWR would happily start including HMS/JHU/etc in their rankings again. Right now this is a dumpster fire for USNWR that shines a very harsh light on the questions underlying the legitimacy of the rankings that have existed for a long time. The real question is what would incentivize these schools to return to the rankings. These top schools finally realized that the rankings need them more than they need the rankings; if your rankings don't have any of HMS, Stanford, Penn or Columbia in the top 10, well, your rankings are wrong.
Exactly. It has zero impact on the medical world. People will still try to get into the top schools and top schools will still send people to top residencies and top residencies will still send graduates to top academic centers. It's this fake wokism. But at the end of the day, they just pay lip service to DEI and what they want really is attract donors to give them more money and DEI is a good marketing strategy now.
True. Real men are incapable of expressing support for other humans.
This makes me so furious now. I know it's a joke, but still... I'm so sick of this "Good ol' boy" club thing.
Unfortunately no. While school rankings depend greatly on institution reporting/participation, USNWR hospital rankings are largely derived from CMS data and require very little active consent/engagement from the hospitals themselves.
They're not ranked high enough
Wouldn't that benefit them, then? People are going to assume Brown Medical School, by the name alone, is a top 20.
