From your questions here, it's clear you're very passionate about a career in medicine. On your last thread (when you were applying to MERP, we reviewed that both your Post Bacc GPA performance and your multiple attempts at the MCAT made proceeding very high risk. You felt there were mitigating circumstances, and decided to proceed.
Per your other thread, you have not passed MERP twice.
It is very, very unlikely that this MedOrigins thing is going to be a magic elixir that's going to help you pass. The Carib schools are not known for high quality professors or support. MERP was remote, MedOrigins appears to be on site -- so is certain to be much more expensive. After all you've done / been through, how is a 16 week program going to move the needle? And in the past you've mentioned interest in fields that are competitive, you're setting yourself up for misery with this plan.
Is Ross/MedOrigin actually worth the risk for someone in my position?
Assessing risk is very individual. The odds of winning powerball is 1 in 292,201,338. That is so astronomically small it's pointless to try. The annual chance of being struck by lightning is 1: 1,200,000 or so. There are 156 powerball drawings per year, and since each drawing is independent the chances of winning over a year is 156 in 292,201,338 which is 1:1,875,000*. So it's more likely to be struck by lightning. Yet, some people play religiously because "well, you never know, someone has to win).
The chance of success here for you is very, very low. The cost of these loans will haunt you forever.
How serious are the attrition and dismissal risks in practice?
We don't know about the MedOrigins program in general. But we know that overall, at least 30% of Ross's class fails out along the way. Since the MedOrigins people are likely less competitive than the rest of the class, one would expect their chances of failure to be higher. You can ask Ross what percentage of those that start MedOrigins make it to graduation -- but unclear if they will tell you or if you can trust what they say. And they are very likely to quote you what percent of those whom pass MedOrigins make it to graduation, which is a very different statistic.
If a student struggles academically early on, how hard is it to recover from that path?
Very difficult. Everything in medical school builds upon what came before. It's one of the major differences between med school and undergrad -- in undergrad if you do poorly on a subject, you usually can just move on with different courses and not worry about it. But in med school, if you don't understant cardiac physiology, you're going to struggle with cardiac pathophys and pharmacology. Once you fall behind, the new material continues to poor in and you're responsible for trying to get caught up on the older material, which is almost impossible.
Is this still a rational way to pursue medicine, or is it more often a desperation move with a poor expected outcome?
No, it is not. It is desperation with a poor expected outcome. You are buying powerball tickets. But instead of spending 156 x $2 = $312, you'll be spending a whole lot more which you will owe. I know this isn't what you want to hear. I recommend you take that passion and focus it upon a more realistic goal -- perhaps still in the medical field. This assumes that your prior post aout failing MERP twice means you actually enrolled and failed. if you mean you applied and failed to get in, then perhaps more reasonable (yet still very high risk) to proceed.
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* For true statistics nerds, the math here is not correct for two reasons. First, I should convert odds to probabilities which can then be accurately multiplied together. But, because the odds are so low, probability essentially equals odds.
Second, because taking the individual odds and multiplying by the number of draws ignores the outcomes where you win more than once. Which although would be real nice, is somewhat pointless. The true probability of winning at least once is calculated by taking the inverse probability of losing and raising it to the 156 power, then subtracting from one.
So, in actuality, we'd take the probability of losing which is 292,201,338/(292,201,338 + 1), raise that to the 156 power, then subtract that from one. That gives us the probability of winning at least once in 156 draws. Then, we can convert back to odds using O = P/(1-P). Using the shortcut above (multiplying the odds) yields a final odds of 1:1873085.5. Using this more accurate method yields 1:1875085.003. The decrease in the odds encompasses the outcomes where you win more than once.
