Stanford racket

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JakeHarley

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  1. Medical Student
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Earlier this month I got a phone call from a nice gentleman at Stanford who wanted to see why I hadn't yet paid my application fee. It turned out that I had made a mistake while paying online, so I went back to their site and paid the fee. He said "thank you, I'l put your file in line to be reviewed."

I just received my rejection letter in the mail, dated THE DAY AFTER I paid my fee.

I think they had reveiwed it already, chose to reject me, and waited for me to pay the fee before sending me the letter.

That's like school in the summer time......NO CLASS 👎 .

Not that I expected to get in to Stanford, but what a joke.
 
wow. thats f*cked. at least stanford sucks and you know it.
-mota
 
Wow, I agree, only one way to describe that: "F*ck'd up". Well, at best f'd up, at worse it's downright unethical. The 'Furd can suck a big fat one. I didn't even apply to Stanfurd this time around. I'd rather use that secondary application fee for an Xbox game or something.
 
that's just wrong. i got rejected to but damn, i'd have been mad. you oughta tell someone about that. if you received the letter the day after, it would have been sent out at least the day before you got the call, which means they'd rejected you before the call.
 
That's just low. I'm so glad I didn't apply there.
 
DarkFark said:
That's just low. I'm so glad I didn't apply there.
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What's so low about it? What about the other couple of thousand applicants who paid over the fee and got rejected? He should have gotten a free review or something?
 
I think a lot of people don't like Stanford because they send out many fast rejections. However, I feel this is a good policy. If I am going to get rejected, I'd like to get rejected as early as possible. It's much worse to get an applicant's hopes up and make him or her spend hundreds of dollars and miss school or work to do an interview before rejecting the applicant than to do it early on in the process.
 
I'd rather get rejected right away, as well. Getting dragged along for 10 weeks or more (can we say UCSF?) is just awful in every way.

And yes, I think post-interview rejections are even worse. Why in the world does WashU need to interview so many candidates? I applied to very few schools that interview tons of people per spot.

However, the situation that the OP described does seem particularly nasty. I would be totally pissed off.
 
WatchingWaiting said:
What's so low about it? What about the other couple of thousand applicants who paid over the fee and got rejected? He should have gotten a free review or something?
Click to expand...

Not that part. The part where they lied.
 
DarkFark said:
Not that part. The part where they lied.
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Word. I've heard that Northwestern does the same thing: they give you an invitation to complete a secondary, and you complete it online. Then, a day later, you receive a rejection via snail-mail. It takes at least a couple days for a rejection to even get to you through the postal service, and you know it was in the works at the school before it got dropped in the mail. So basically, they take your money when they know they're already going to reject you.

Shady as all get out.
 
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JakeHarley said:
That's like school in the summer time......NO CLASS 👎 .
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u get that from Scrubs? 😉
 
You're so much better off not at Stanford. I went to high school in Palo Alto and, well, it sucks.
 
I developed a distaste for Stanford simply because of their (own) description in the MSAR. "Applicants whose MCAT scores are below the national mean are highly unlikely to be admitted to the medical school."

That's about all they have down for selection factors. I could have probably figured that out for myself. Compare it with other schools and you'll see what I mean.
 
yourmom25 said:
that's just wrong. i got rejected to but damn, i'd have been mad. you oughta tell someone about that. if you received the letter the day after, it would have been sent out at least the day before you got the call, which means they'd rejected you before the call.
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Hey who wrote your letters of rec for you?
 
rocketman said:
I developed a distaste for Stanford simply because of their (own) description in the MSAR. "Applicants whose MCAT scores are below the national mean are highly unlikely to be admitted to the medical school."
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What's wrong with telling people that if they get below a 24 they have very little chance of gaining acceptance? It just reduces the number of unqualified applicants they have to deal with...
 
shantster said:
Oh yes.. that's where I've heard that one before! :laugh:
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isnt it from fat ablert?
 
regardless of whether or not they give out fast rejections, that was low. since you've already been rejected you have nothing to lose -- if i were you, i'd call them up and b!tch them out.
 
Joonie said:
regardless of whether or not they give out fast rejections, that was low. since you've already been rejected you have nothing to lose -- if i were you, i'd call them up and b!tch them out.
Click to expand...
I'd say this were a good idea if it weren't for the fact that some medical schools DO keep in touch.

My advice? Keep it on the low down until you have your first acceptance in hand.
 
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Labslave said:
What's wrong with telling people that if they get below a 24 they have very little chance of gaining acceptance? It just reduces the number of unqualified applicants they have to deal with...
Click to expand...

Like I said, I think people already know they don't have a good shot at attending Stanford with MCAT scores below a 24. Why choose to put that in instead of something more helpful? It is also a very elitist and poorly worded statement IMO. Read the selection criteria for any other top school and you at least get some idea of what they are looking for in a candidate...beyond an MCAT score.
 
I think I am totally going to get bombarded here, but...

You messed up and didn't pay your fee, but they still reviewed your file and probably noticed it as they were looking through it, whatever. They decided to reject you but you did not pay. The other people (presumably hundreds) that they rejected all had to pay, and it wouldn't be fair to say that this person made a mistake but we are going to reject them anyways so they don't need to pay like everyone else. At least some of your money goes to the administrative fees associated with looking at your application (and making their online system) so you got what you paid for even though the result isn't what you were hoping for.

I am sure if you knew what was going to happen, you wouldn't have paid and withdrew your application, and I would have too. Obviously you paid because you thought or at least hoped you were going to get an interview, etc. It sucks to get rejected, but what would you have prefered them to do? Get your money and wait a month?
 
argonana said:
Gunn or Paly?

Palo Alto's not that bad.....
Click to expand...

Gunn.

I would agree that there are many worse places to live, but to me Palo Alto sort of epitomizes suburban upper-middle-class complacency, if that makes any sense. And it feels mostly dead.

Not a place I'd want to be, but to each his own, of course.
 
doublepeak said:
I think I am totally going to get bombarded here, but...

You messed up and didn't pay your fee, but they still reviewed your file and probably noticed it as they were looking through it, whatever. They decided to reject you but you did not pay. The other people (presumably hundreds) that they rejected all had to pay, and it wouldn't be fair to say that this person made a mistake but we are going to reject them anyways so they don't need to pay like everyone else. At least some of your money goes to the administrative fees associated with looking at your application (and making their online system) so you got what you paid for even though the result isn't what you were hoping for.

I am sure if you knew what was going to happen, you wouldn't have paid and withdrew your application, and I would have too. Obviously you paid because you thought or at least hoped you were going to get an interview, etc. It sucks to get rejected, but what would you have prefered them to do? Get your money and wait a month?
Click to expand...

I don't expect to get anything for free, but I do expect a school with the stature and reputation of Stanford to be less deceptive.

I somehow doubt that my file was "reviewed" at all--that implies that someone actually read it. They don't review applications "by accident" that aren't already complete (with fee.) I get the feeling that I simply got rejected based on numbers, which is common at schools like Stanford. I feel like I paid $85 for a computer to go "GPA=x.xx MCAT=xx.......REJECT."

Take this and my previous post with a grain of salt, I am a bit cynical about this whole process. Looking forward to starting school next fall and having it all behind me. 👍
 
shantster said:
Oh yes.. that's where I've heard that one before! :laugh:
Click to expand...

I may have got it from there....I don't remember. But I do love that show. 😀
 
The students that come out of stanford suck at clinical medicine anyways...at least from my experiences.
 
JakeHarley said:
Earlier this month I got a phone call from a nice gentleman at Stanford who wanted to see why I hadn't yet paid my application fee. It turned out that I had made a mistake while paying online, so I went back to their site and paid the fee. He said "thank you, I'l put your file in line to be reviewed."

I just received my rejection letter in the mail, dated THE DAY AFTER I paid my fee.

I think they had reveiwed it already, chose to reject me, and waited for me to pay the fee before sending me the letter.

That's like school in the summer time......NO CLASS 👎 .

Not that I expected to get in to Stanford, but what a joke.
Click to expand...

don't worry, i got your back. hey, stanford, eat this:

kidsgift.jpg
 
glp said:
isnt it from fat ablert?
Click to expand...

I'm assuming that it's in there too since I remember hearing that joke in the one scrubs episode where they kept making fat albert jokes.
 
Spartacus said:
The students that come out of stanford suck at clinical medicine anyways...at least from my experiences.
Click to expand...

i don't know if they are terrible doctors, but from my experiences, i would say that they all need to turn around and take a phlebotomy class. there wasn't one med student i met who had skill in finding their way to a vein with a needle. they just stab and stab and stab...
 
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it. said:
don't worry, i got your back. hey, stanford, eat this:

kidsgift.jpg
Click to expand...


Hahaha!

"Wowwie, Dad! Thanks for getting me that Stinger for Christmas just like I asked!"
 
Where do you find pictures like this It?
 
Ha ha, the little girl is pretty cute. I wonder what the real context of the picture was.
 
doublepeak said:
I think I am totally going to get bombarded here, but...

You messed up and didn't pay your fee, but they still reviewed your file and probably noticed it as they were looking through it, whatever. They decided to reject you but you did not pay. The other people (presumably hundreds) that they rejected all had to pay, and it wouldn't be fair to say that this person made a mistake but we are going to reject them anyways so they don't need to pay like everyone else. At least some of your money goes to the administrative fees associated with looking at your application (and making their online system) so you got what you paid for even though the result isn't what you were hoping for.

I am sure if you knew what was going to happen, you wouldn't have paid and withdrew your application, and I would have too. Obviously you paid because you thought or at least hoped you were going to get an interview, etc. It sucks to get rejected, but what would you have prefered them to do? Get your money and wait a month?
Click to expand...

I do agree with your post, but I don't blame the OP for being completely PISSED OFF. This brings to memory another nasty trick Stanford played on us in high school. My friends and I got the same letter from Stanford, saying basically this: "You're very well-qualified, so we want to cover your app fee for you." Well, too bad, since all of us had mailed in our apps and $75 checks like 2 months ago. It sort of pissed me off b/c 1.) it was like 2 weeks before the deadline! What "well-qualified" high schooler in his or her right mind would turn in their app so late?? 2.) I bet they had already received my app AND cashed in my check!

One of my friends actually called Stanford and asked if she could turn in her fee waiver now and get her money back. Of course, they flatly declined to do that. Again, it's like Stanford somehow managed not to break the rules yet their practices reek of insincerity!
 
Messerschmitts said:
Ha ha, the little girl is pretty cute. I wonder what the real context of the picture was.
Click to expand...

Yeah, we should have a contest for best caption or something.

"Having trouble meeting their recruitment quotas recently, the Army has expanded their efforts from high schools to include Hillary Duff concerts."
 
Sounds like sour grapes to me. Stanford rocks! It is an amazing climate and close to San Francisco. The problem is there are only 86 students per class with an application pool of near 6000 I think. Unfortunately, with there great true pass/fail system and great campus supply and demand causes them to cut early. It's still a great school. Wish i could be one of the few selected!
 
docsuz said:
Sounds like sour grapes to me. Stanford rocks! It is an amazing climate and close to San Francisco. The problem is there are only 86 students per class with an application pool of near 6000 I think. Unfortunately, with there great true pass/fail system and great campus supply and demand causes them to cut early. It's still a great school. Wish i could be one of the few selected!
Click to expand...

Umm, you realize no one from Stanford's ADCOM is reading this right?
 
JakeHarley said:
I don't expect to get anything for free, but I do expect a school with the stature and reputation of Stanford to be less deceptive.

I somehow doubt that my file was "reviewed" at all--that implies that someone actually read it. They don't review applications "by accident" that aren't already complete (with fee.) I get the feeling that I simply got rejected based on numbers, which is common at schools like Stanford. I feel like I paid $85 for a computer to go "GPA=x.xx MCAT=xx.......REJECT."

Take this and my previous post with a grain of salt, I am a bit cynical about this whole process. Looking forward to starting school next fall and having it all behind me. 👍
Click to expand...

i think this is the real heart of the matter and shows the sleaziness of lots of schools. if you don't have a chance of admission based on your numbers, they shouldn't be sending you a secondary that they're not even going to bother to review. it's money-grubbing, plain and simple, and yes, you do expect better from schools as established (and probably as well-endowed) as stanford.

stanford seems overly caught up on the whole pretentiousness thing anyway.
 
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grendel said:
Yeah, we should have a contest for best caption or something.

"Having trouble meeting their recruitment quotas recently, the Army has expanded their efforts from high schools to include Hillary Duff concerts."
Click to expand...
👍
 
Is it sleazy? Yes.
Is it still one of my top choices? Yes.

I'm really sorry to hear what happened--it burns me. It was a terrible thing for them to do, but I can't get over how much I like the school. And to think, I actually didn't really care about it too much until I read its curriculum (I applied to four Cali schools, but at the time, didn't really think I wanted to live that far away from home).
 
JakeHarley said:
Earlier this month I got a phone call from a nice gentleman at Stanford who wanted to see why I hadn't yet paid my application fee. It turned out that I had made a mistake while paying online, so I went back to their site and paid the fee. He said "thank you, I'l put your file in line to be reviewed."

I just received my rejection letter in the mail, dated THE DAY AFTER I paid my fee.

I think they had reveiwed it already, chose to reject me, and waited for me to pay the fee before sending me the letter.

That's like school in the summer time......NO CLASS 👎 .

Not that I expected to get in to Stanford, but what a joke.
Click to expand...

What I would do is write a letter to the dean, wherein you protest this behavior. The exact same thing happened to me at Cornell's Tri-I MD/PhD two years ago. They sent an e-mail demanding my letters of recommendation, then several days later I received a rejection letter dated three weeks BEFORE the "warning" e-mail.

That's just disgusting. It indicates that they already made their decision before the application was substatially complete (i.e. it wasn't just the fee that was missing, it was the letters, which are an essential component of a fair evaluation of the applicant). I didn't take them up on it, in case I had to reapply.

But, in your situation, if you feel that you will get in *somewhere* this year, I would suggest writing a letter to the dean protesting this sort of behavior.

The *proper* policy should be:

Applications are evaluated for admission or rejection ONLY when they are complete, including the payment of the fee by the deadline. Applications should be reviewed preliminarily for completion (if some schools screen pre-secondary, that's fine), and applicants should be notified as to missing components of the application, but no interview/rejection reviews should be made until the application is complete.
 
I'm sorry, but I don't understand why you are so peeved. Why should you not have to pay your application fee like everyone else? Thousands of other people are rejected from Stanford, yet they still have to pay their fee only to later learn that they were rejected, which is how every other school's admissions office operates anyway.

As far as the date of your rejection letter -- I also don't understand why you're pissed that it's dated the day after your application became complete. Do you really think that it takes a week for someone to physically read through your application? No, I'm sorry to say that it takes less than 30 minutes to read through an entire application, including LORs. I know, because I used to do file reviewing and interviewing for Stanford's ADCOM when I was a student there.

Stanford's admission process, like that of every other med school in the country, is set up in stages. At the first stage, the file is reviewed by someone in the admissions office. If you don't make the "cut" (whatever that may be), you get a rejection. If you pass that stage, your file gets sent to two reviewers -- a faculty member and a student, who then evaluate your application and recommend whether or not they think the applicant should get an interview. If they don't think an interview should be offered, and the Dean of admissions agrees, you get a rejection. And so on, and so on. As you can imagine, the first stage of the process is very fast, and often applications get through the initial stage of review the same day that they become complete.

Stanford's admissions office has been making a huge effort to try to process applications on a much more timely basis than in the past. It used to be very common to have to wait until April to find out whether you get an interview. So just because they reviewed your application as soon as they could doesn't mean that they were doing anything shady. It's not like the rejection letter was dated before your application was complete.... THAT would definitely be shady.

I would suggest that you be thankful that they didn't string you along waiting for a decision for months, and move on to focus on other schools.
 
AJM said:
I'm sorry, but I don't understand why you are so peeved. Why should you not have to pay your application fee like everyone else? Thousands of other people are rejected from Stanford, yet they still have to pay their fee only to later learn that they were rejected, which is how every other school's admissions office operates anyway.

As far as the date of your rejection letter -- I also don't understand why you're pissed that it's dated the day after your application became complete. Do you really think that it takes a week for someone to physically read through your application? No, I'm sorry to say that it takes less than 30 minutes to read through an entire application, including LORs. I know, because I used to do file reviewing and interviewing for Stanford's ADCOM when I was a student there.

Stanford's admission process, like that of every other med school in the country, is set up in stages. At the first stage, the file is reviewed by someone in the admissions office. If you don't make the "cut" (whatever that may be), you get a rejection. If you pass that stage, your file gets sent to two reviewers -- a faculty member and a student, who then evaluate your application and recommend whether or not they think the applicant should get an interview. If they don't think an interview should be offered, and the Dean of admissions agrees, you get a rejection. And so on, and so on. As you can imagine, the first stage of the process is very fast, and often applications get through the initial stage of review the same day that they become complete.

Stanford's admissions office has been making a huge effort to try to process applications on a much more timely basis than in the past. It used to be very common to have to wait until April to find out whether you get an interview. So just because they reviewed your application as soon as they could doesn't mean that they were doing anything shady. It's not like the rejection letter was dated before your application was complete.... THAT would definitely be shady.

I would suggest that you be thankful that they didn't string you along waiting for a decision for months, and move on to focus on other schools.
Click to expand...

Did I strike a nerve? 😉

The first stage is fast because it is based on MCAT and academic record, both of which they have on the PRIMARY application, which has its own fee.

If they are going to make huge cuts based on these simple criteria, they could do it without soliciting a secondary + secondary fee. The assertion that someone sat down and CAREFULLY read my application for consideration is horsesh*t. They took one look at my first couple of quarters in college where I messed up (I am a non-trad) and hit the "reject" key.

They could've done that pre-secondary, like many other schools, but they chose to make a personal phone call to secure my $80, then rejected me based on informatiojn they had long before they had my complete secondary.

Its not just Stanford that does this either, a lot of schools do this. Yes, its a great source of revenue. But can you honestly say you are HAPPY with this system--where we have to regurgitate our application a second time for each school and pay a second application fee?

I'm not. Its a racket.

P.S.-I've got a 3.6/36...but I failed a couple of classes as a freshman. I'm now 28 with 2 years hospital clinical work experience, 3 years research experience, over 1 year of AWESOME shadowing experience, and 6 years "life" experience. If they had read my file "carefully" with anything in mind other than looking at my transcripts, I think things would have turned out differently. Again, they could have made this decision based on the info in my primary app.
 
exlawgrrl said:
i think this is the real heart of the matter and shows the sleaziness of lots of schools. if you don't have a chance of admission based on your numbers, they shouldn't be sending you a secondary that they're not even going to bother to review. it's money-grubbing, plain and simple, and yes, you do expect better from schools as established (and probably as well-endowed) as stanford.

stanford seems overly caught up on the whole pretentiousness thing anyway.
Click to expand...

Should've read this before writing my own essay! Same point, but much more succinct. 😀
 
One has to separate the admissions departments from the schools. With regard to MCAT scores, I don't think *anybody* below the national means gets in anywhere. Isn't the national mean a 25?
 
Spartacus said:
The students that come out of stanford suck at clinical medicine anyways...at least from my experiences.
Click to expand...

I totally agree. In fact, I know of at least one very well respected program that proclaimed no one from Stanford med would ever train there...
 
docsuz said:
Sounds like sour grapes to me. Stanford rocks! It is an amazing climate and close to San Francisco. The problem is there are only 86 students per class with an application pool of near 6000 I think. Unfortunately, with there great true pass/fail system and great campus supply and demand causes them to cut early. It's still a great school. Wish i could be one of the few selected!
Click to expand...

True that!
 
JakeHarley said:
Did I strike a nerve? 😉
Click to expand...

Not at all. I just don't know why you are so pissed about this rejection in particular, especially since it is similar to what other med schools do.

I'd also like to clarify that Stanford does not look at just your MCATs and GPA during the initial screening. Sure they don't spend a huge amount of time on your file in the preliminary screening, but there are very specific things they look for in your application in order to send your file on for further review. If the preliminary screening was all about your numbers, why is it that there are people out there with numbers such as 3.9/38, for example, who got rejected right off the bat just like you did? I can also say that during the time I was file reviewing and interviewing, I reviewed a good number of files with subpar numbers (way lower than your 3.6/36, including people who had some F's on their transcripts) -- these applications made it past the initial screening phase. If the admissions office only based the initial screening on stats, those files never would have made it to review.

If you feel that you were rejected in error, I would suggest that you appeal the decision and get your file re-evaluated. As I had mentioned in a previous thread, they definitely take appeals seriously, and they will take additional time to more thoroughly re-review your file.


BTW - you have been making a number of assumptions about the admissions process. In particular, you are assuming that they rejected you because you had a couple of F's your freshman year, when in fact they could have rejected you for an entirely different reason, possibly not having anything to do with your grade history. The only way you can really know why you were rejected is to call the admissions office and ask (not just ask the secretary, but ask someone who's in charge). The Dean of Admissions often talks with applicants who were rejected about the reasonings behind the rejection... and sometimes he will even reverse the decision. (don't mean to get your hopes up, but it's been known to happen)
 
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