2020-2021 Waitlist Support Thread
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@gonnif wrote this back in 2016 on a different thread, hope it helps:
No
The Multiple Acceptance Report, which is released and updated daily in February, allows only schools that have accepted you, where else you are holding acceptances. They will see this only after they have accepted you. It does not show to anything to schools where you have not been accepted, nor does it show to any schools at any time where else you may have applied to and are awaiting actions. This can be used by schools to estimate how many spots they may fill and how many acceptances over the number of seats they should offer.
The National Acceptance Report, which is released starting May 1st (after action deadline of April 30th) allows every school to see all applicants with acceptance or matriculated action. If I am not mistaken, it does not indicate waitlisted status as that is a school specific standard/action. So if you are on a waitlist in mid-May, a school can see if you have acceptances else where prior to offering you a spot.
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We no longer have a Multiple Accepts Report.
We have never been able to see where you have applied, been interviewed, waitlisted or rejected.
The “old” traffic rules included the AMCAS centrally-created national / multiple acceptance reports which never included waitlist information.
The “new” traffic rules are based on decentralized CYMS (choose your medical school) never included a way for a school that has accepted you to see where or even if you have been waitlisted. It does allow schools that have waitlisted you to see if you have acceptance at a school. At no time does any school see where you have been accepted only that you have an acceptance
With all due respect, this is not technically true. It does NOT allow schools to see acceptances. It only allows them to see PTE/CTE. This is an important distinction, because all schools do NOT require a PTE selection on 4/30. Plus, people can have multiple As before 4/30, and never have to make a PTE selection before that date, in which case schools CANNOT see whether or not their WL candidates hold As.
can you elaborate on this a little bit? im confused. i thought the aamc dictates the rule?
Yup. AAMC controls the CYMS tool. Schools load As into the tool, which allows candidates to select PTE beginning 2/19, and PTE/CTE beginning 4/30. Schools can see aggregate data beginning 2/19 on whether their candidates with As have selected PTE at their school or another, but cannot indentify individual candidates.
Beginning on 4/30, schools can run reports to see whether their WL and A candidates have selected PTE/CTE. They can identify the candidate, but cannot see the other school. They can never see other As, or other WLs. They can only see PTE/CTE, and only after 4/30.
I really wouldn't think too hard about it. If you are accepted, you PTE to the school you want to go to on April 30th. When you are certain you want to commit, you select CTE. You can get lost in the sauce for hours, but please dont over think it.
That's interesting, I always assumed schools had access to the "designated programs" pages in the primary that list the applicant's "school name", "program type", and "previously applied?" but perhaps this is only viewable on this applicant's copy of the primary?
I stand corrected. Prior to 4/30 medical schools only have aggregate reports for total number of students. After 4/30 its acceptances per student. Just to reiterate, at no time can a medical school where you hold an acceptance or on the waitlist can ever see where else you have an acceptance. All they know is you have one somewhere
Medical schools never know where else you have ever applied to
I don't know for sure if this is true specifically for TMDSAS. I'm a student going to a Texas state school for undergraduate and our prehealth advisors told us that the school list you select is sent as part of the primary application, and that some previous students have been asked during interviews to explain why they didn't apply to all of the Texas schools if they really wanted to be a doctor. This is secondhand so maybe it's not true, but it's what I heard from the advisors at my school's prehealth office.
Edit: Just to be clear, TMDSAS is just a potential exception. It does hold true for AMCAS.
Also, in case you are unaware, I know of at least two schools that do NOT require use of PTE on 4/30, even though one of them still requires a deposit to hold the seat. The only reason for this would be to allow people to mask their A to WL schools.
This is why the difference between an A and PTE is not inconsequential. PTE means you are holding an A, but not selecting PTE does not necessarily mean you are not holding one. WL schools can see PTEs, but not As.
@JustinGr56 I think this may be a long-circulated myth that TMDSAS schools can see whether you applied to them all or look down on you if you didn't.
I'll ask someone at TMDSAS about this.
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Lol I’m now shifting my thinking from “there will be lots of WL” to “surely schools under-accepted and will start pulling from the WL here soon”
Besides your own or a friend's, you aren't going to see many posts indicating they just got off the WL to maintain anonymity.
It's also not May 1st yet!
So I’m interested...with April 30th being on a Friday this year, will we have to wait until May 3th to witness the full effect of people withdrawing their A’s / selecting CTE in terms of WL movement? I know it’s a steady trickle into May as well, but I’m mostly referring to the big movement that is expected on that day.
I honestly think you might be setting yourself up for disappointment if you are expecting big movement on that particular day. Candidates waiting until the last minute will have until midnight to make a selection. After that, schools will have to go into the system, see what's what, decide whether to unilaterally rescind people who didn't make a selection and withdraw, or to reach out to them to remind them of their obligations, etc., etc., etc. And then, first make decisions about who to call.
All this could happen at any time, starting now if seats are open, and extending into the first few weeks of May. April 30th is a trigger. It's not the be all, end all of WL movement. I'd temper expectations and focus more on the first week of May rather than Friday, April 30th. Better to set expectations low and maybe be pleasantly surprised rather than setting yourself for a very anxious weekend. JMHO.
If I had to guess- yes. My guess is that it takes time for the administrative side of making an A offer which hopefully will take place over the weekend!
Do we actually think that people from these schools would work over the weekend to send out offers though?
yea WL movement is a trickle like someone said earlier, no one wants to just out themself online (I doubt adcoms really care to read these boards to find out who's who, but I understand the thought process)
It is Not a single day of big movement, the acceptances pretty much come in waves.
Like beach waves...just stressful and scarier xD... if anyone hears back feel free to say it in this group so we know the chains are moving!
Will do. I’m still interested in what was said earlier in this thread about the people that heard from adcoms that they will be pulling from the WL more since there were fewer initial A’s handed out, and what that means for us on the WL.
Okay so we are depending on A's to be withdrawn, and there are less A's handed out... does that mean this cycle will have limited WL mvmt or will the chains get rolling like usual but we just waiting on those specific peeps with multiple A's?
I guess I’m confused now... wouldn’t the need to narrow down acceptances to one lead to some students coming off the WL due to people rescinding their A? Like of course there will be more A’s withdrawn over the next couple weeks in May [in total], but in terms of a single-day movement, April 30 (and May 1st or the following day) would be the biggest fallout in terms of immediate movement d/t the deadline.
Omg last week, this thread gave me hope, and now this thread is taking away my hope. Dont do this..........🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲
I'm flattered! Two years ago, when CYMS and PTE/CTE first started, the speculation was that, since schools lost their precious MAR, they would be more conservative with As, and that would lead to increased WL movement. It never happened, and the post-mortem consensus was that fewer initial As lead to fewer people holding fewer multiple As, and that led to less WL movement, counteracting whatever increased movement might have been caused by fewer initial As.This year might be different, because virtual interviews might have led to more stars holding more multiple As than usual, which would lead to more WL movement, even with fewer overall As being handed out. There really is no way to know until it happens. The only good news here is that it is very close to being over.
I am just asking xD I really don't know like I understand the logic but I am trying to figure out as a system how this works!
@Julatteluver it was your post that I kept re-reading today to give myself hope for movement this cycle lmao
Now my newly upgraded neurotic brain came up with two logics
1) schools did under-accept (compared to previous cycles), to the point where they are fully expecting to utilize waitlist more. -> this will probably be true for low tier and some mid tier schools especially since it’s impossible for schools to know an applicant’s cycle results so admissions probably know that applicants will drop their schools eventually
2) schools did not under accept enough, which will lead to having more applicants with just one acceptance. This may freeze the expected waitlist movement if many applicants do not have multiple options to choose from.
i don’t think we will know until some sort of data gets published in the future. What I’m thinking is that rule 1&2 are both somewhat true and at this point, we just gotta PRAY that the schools that we are waitlisted at will have a significant waitlist movement
See I was thinking all of #2... didn't think too much about #1 soooo I hope #1 comes in clutch! (more so than 2)
Not necessarily.
On 4/30, people have to select one school as PTE. They are SUPPOSED to withdraw from the other schools, but many people don't bother. They expect the schools to figure it out when they see they were not selected as PTE.
Some schools, upon seeing this, unilaterally rescind their As, and that's that. Other schools take the time to communicate with the candidate, reminding them of the deadline, and ask them what they are doing. This could take days to play out.
In addition, depending on their process, most schools do not have a list of candidates prepared to immediately call off the WL. Some schools meet to make decisions. Others try to match calls to the profile of who withdrew, etc. This takes time.
Could take a day, could take a few days. It would actually be pretty extraordinary if the movement caused by the 4/30 PTE deadline actually occurred on 4/30. It could be that weekend. It could also be the following week, or even the week after. As was said before, it will probably be in waves, starting soon after 4/30, but not necessarily on that day.
I think 1) logic has to play a role since many highly wanted applicants received a ton of IIs and there was no financial burden since everything was virtual. I guess one thing is that we have no idea how many star applicants there are. Depending on that number, the influence of 1) logic will be determined
See the thing that I’m thinking is about how last cycle the general WL movement seemed to be “normal” compared to the lower WL movement the cycle where the CYMS tool was unveiled. So med schools had to have fixed something in this process to see relatively the same movement as before the cycle with the new rules..
The thing is, nothing about this cycle was normal and I don’t think there was much med schools could do to embrace the impact of COVID. But I think the general idea is that schools are expecting more movement right?....? Right....?
