Acceptance numbers skewed?

[jsternitzky]

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Since so many pre-med students apply to several schools, doesn't that skew the overall medical school acceptance.

ex. If 100 students each apply to 4 schools. Those schools only accept 25 students a year and so hypothetically every student could get into medical school (100% acceptance overall) but every school advertises only a 25% acceptance rate.

Are there really than many people who apply to 5-10 school and never get in?

 

[NickNaylor]

Yes, this happens, and yes, there are people who apply to many schools that don't get in. Just because you apply to multiple schools doesn't mean that you've applied smartly. There are also people that have ludicrous expectations and have very weak applications but apply anyway.

 

[aSagacious]

Are there really than many people who apply to 5-10 school and never get in?

Yes, you can see the specific data on the AAMC FACTS page, US News publication, or the AAMC MSAR.

What you're suggesting is true on a school-specific level (that the acceptance percentage would appear "artificially low") but you can see the overall figures on the AAMC summary pages.

 

[music2doc]

This is why % Accepted is important. For most schools, a good approximation is 1.5-2.5x the class size are accepted and 3-9x the class size are interviewed. There is an old spreadsheet floating around that does a pretty good job of modeling this process, but I think it's been banned from SDN so it's hard to get your hands on.

 

[flatearth22]

A little less than 60% of applicants (~30,000 people) to US Allopathic schools end up with 0 acceptances, so it's still pretty competitive. Amongst those 60% though, include applicants who applied too late, didn't apply broadly enough, and/or had no business applying due to lack of health-care related EC's and extremely low MCAT/GPA.

Also the MSAR only reports number of students who applied, interviewed, and matriculated (and breaks it up into in-state, OOS, and international). Check out US News to see the number of students who applied, interviewed, were accepted, and matriculated. The yield rate (the number of seats divided by the number of acceptances) varies from as low as 25% at some schools (classic safety schools) to close to 80% at others (top 5 schools). Most schools hover around 50%.