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[Med Ed]

Can I ask you something else? Would you say that the true post-II rate for any given school is higher than what is published? The reason I say this is essentially because of waitlist withdrawals.

If someone withdraws from the waitlist, it’s because they have other acceptances. Which means that person is likely a strong contender and had a good chance to get off the waitlist. So the school has to pull someone else off a waitlist seat, perhaps someone who didn’t had any other offers.

Of course, some schools don’t touch their waitlist. So their post-II rate is as published. But I’d reckon for the ones that have extremely significant waitlist movement (Wake, for example) there is a much larger effect.

Example:

A school interviews 500 people for 100 seats. They initially give 100 acceptances, 200 WL, and 200 rejections.

On April 30, 40 accepted applicants withdraw their acceptance and 100 people withdraw their waitlist. So the school makes 40 offers to the remaining pool of 100 WL candidates.

So overall the school made 140 offers. The published rate will be 140/500 = 28%.

But technically, 100 WL’ed people withdrew (and were likely to be very strong contenders to get a waitlist offer because they had other acceptances).

So really the rate should be 140/400 = 35%

Agree with @LizzyM here, from the school's perspective the only meaningful statistic in this scenario is that it needed to make 1.4 offers for each available seat in order to fill its class. To my knowledge this ratio is about 1.5-3.0 at the large majority of allopathic schools.

Established schools take their respective ratios into account when deciding how many applicants to interview and how many initial offers to make.

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[Med Ed]

I guess I'm at one of those places that can fill all the slots with strong candidates.... I had more >520s than < 517s in the last week of interviews.

Our metrics don't decline much over each cycle, it's the rest of the applications that get thinner and thinner.

 

[Med Ed]

PBL is the future. Not saying its good or bad. But I'm surprised all medical schools haven't adopted this by now.

PBL was first used in an American medical school in 1975 (University of New Mexico). It had a period of popularity back in the 1990's, but then regressed. Now it seems to be making a comeback, perhaps because it's one of two commonly available strategies to fulfill LCME requirements for self-directed and lifelong learning.

 

[Goro]

PBL is the future. Not saying its good or bad. But I'm surprised all medical schools haven't adopted this by now.

It's labor intensive, for starters

 

[Angus Avagadro]

It's labor intensive, for starters

Indeed it is. But it sets up for a leaner number of faculty required to run the program as opposed to the monolithic lecture pathways at many established schools. Much cheaper from and administrative perspective. As far as PBL facilitators, our cagey old Dean used to tell us that facilitators were traffic cops, the less said the better. Their job was to provide direction, not information. Our PBL students have a high degree of intellectual curiosity, which provides better retention and sparks the lifelong learner.

 

[LizzyM]

Indeed it is. But it sets up for a leaner number of faculty required to run the program as opposed to the monolithic lecture pathways at many established schools. Much cheaper from and administrative perspective. As far as PBL facilitators, our cagey old Dean used to tell us that facilitators were traffic cops, the less said the better. Their job was to provide direction, not information. Our PBL students have a high degree of intellectual curiosity, which provides better retention and sparks the lifelong learner.

It does require warm bodies to serve as those traffic cops, usually one for every 7-9 students. That can be a challenge, particularly when it is expected as "good citizenship" but not highly valued when it comes to promotion or even retention (tenure is not even on the table for most med school faculty members). That said, we've been using PBL for several decades and students who sit in on resident conferences where a specific patient is discussed do see the parallel to what they do in PBL.