How is someone who under performed for three years then got back on track for one looked at less favorably than someone who under performed for four years then got back on track for one?
no, the uneven application of that policy doesn’t make sense to me. It’s still awesome that they have policies like that, it’s very very much helps nontraditional applicants and anything that helps out a population without hurting anyone else is fantastic I love it. It’s still just strange to me. What if someone under performed for two years took three years off of school and came back and Excelled for the rest of undergrad? I feel as if those cases are much more common than post bachelorette credits. I would rather policies like this be based on the context of the applicant, not the context of the number of credits they have more whether the credits came after graduation or not.
But what do I know, I’m not in admissions.
Because the latter performed an act of penance, by doing extra work, post graduation, while the former didn't. I don't think the issue is one being more qualified than the other. To me, it's just that they want the extra work to justify looking past the early poor performance.
I'm also not in admissions. I'm only expressing an opinion based on what makes sense to me.
Everyone has to get a bachelors degree, whether they do it in two years straight through with dual enrollment in HS, or in 10 years with plenty of gaps. Excusing early bad performance for some but not all candidates (i.e., maybe only looking at the last year or two for everyone), is the very definition of an uneven application of a policy, so it isn't done, formally, although there are some schools that reward significant upward trends in UG, which is a form of giving less weight to the early years.
So, the issue isn't really that it's one year of work, who cares when it was done? The requirement is to compel extra work, beyond that required for the degree. It's not unfair, because you can avoid it, like many people do, simply by not messing up in UG. Also, the benefits are not limited to those who mess up early and then improve. You can tank all 4 years, or have a downward trend, and still take advantage of the policy, so there's that!
It's totally understandable that you would prefer a policy that benefited your situation, without requiring extra work or expense, but the whole idea of the policy is to require extra work (if not expense) to make it fair to people who didn't screw up early. The alternative isn't to just look at whatever is most favorable to each candidate. It's to not do this at all and to just look at the entire 4 years and proceed accordingly, as many school currently do. Remember, schools don't exactly need to be beating the bushes looking for viable candidates to fill their classes.
This is a benefit provided by a select few schools to allow people to overcome a subpar UG record and still be admitted. Schools' challenge in general is to whittle down applications to a manageable number, which is why so many people with very decent applications don't receive IIs. It's not to find a way to look most favorably on each applicant in order to scrounge up enough people to interview.
Also, there is no such thing as something that helps someone without hurting someone else in med school admissions. The number of spots at each school is fixed. Every spot given to a non-trad who had a bad UG wiped away under the 32 credit policy means someone else, maybe someone with a solid 4 year GPA, is not occupying that seat. Regardless of what the adcoms on SDN say, med school admissions is a zero sum game at the end of the day, and we truly are competing with everyone else as well as with ourselves. Any benefit given to one subset of the pool has to result in something being taken away from someone else in the pool. It's basic math.
