It's not necessary to increase the number of IIs that go to URM if you are willing to decrease the number of non-URM applicants who are interviewed. If the yield of URM is poor (because we're all chasing the small pool of highly qualified URM) then the yield from the non-URM admitted student pool has to be even higher than it has been historically or you go deeper into your waitlist to fill the class.
What classifies a URM as high stat? I know that for AAs, the average applicant MCAT is like a 498. So would a 510 be considered high stat for an AA? What about for someone that’s White?
It depends on the school you're applying to. A 3.9/518 applicant will be considered "high stats" at schools like Drexel but very unremarkable -- and potentially even 'below average' -- at T20's like Harvard, NYU, Columbia, Hopkins, Penn, etc.
I think a URM with those stats at those schools would probably be considered "target". ORM's would definitely be below average.
I am a white Latino and have received II's at almost every T20 that has sent out II's so far (including NYU and a few other stat schools) with a ~516/3.9x strong research trad applicant fairly unremarkable. No ideas if those will be A's but still. Faha's school list for my WAMC included almost no T20s and every other AO said I would not be counted as URM but at an interview I was explicitly told I was "diversity or URM." Maybe @LizzyM can comment because I recall seeing a comment from them elsewhere saying that many schools bend the rules of who can be counted as URM to get more high(er) stat rich people or just the former.
Didn’t you say in another thread that you went to one of Harvard, Yale, or Princeton? 3.9x from any of those schools offsets the MCAT.
I mean, yes, I do, but there is absolutely no way going to one of those schools can count for 5 MCAT points like what? It's a marginal increase, if anything...it's not going to make my entire application especially at schools that have the choice of countless other HYP kids with 520+. Also no shortage of URM premeds in their and my cohort (or at most top undergrads for that matter), or maybe I'm just not considering it relatively. Who knows. Thinking about it isn't worth it.
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I can only speak from personal experience as a hiring manager and from what seem to be generally-used practices in industry. I, or a delegate, would hold a 30-min call with an applicant who looks good on paper. The goals are to validate key info that's on the resume and get a sense if they're a good fit (which is also important to the candidate if you want an acceptance to a potential offer). If they pass the smell test, we hold in-person interviews. In my experience, we weed out at least 50% and save a lot of people's time. I realize that med school app process is different in many respects so I have no sense how much this would increase efficiency and acceptance yield. On the other hand, why fix what isn't broke? If med schools have a process that works and there's no big issue to force change, I wouldn't expect them to do so unless they're like me who is naturally driven to improve what seems to be easily improvable.
Ummm that’s incorrect …
AAMC Table A-18 -- Average AA applicant = 498.3.
Yes. AAMC also publishes numbers for matriculants. For AA, it is 505.7, and, TBH, that's probably the more relevant number to use for these purposes. The numbers Duke publishes, however, suggest URM do better across the board as compared to the rest of the pool, so it stands to reason that their admit rate, while most likely below 50%, is probably going to be better than the 34% or whatever the overall number is going to be this year for the pool as a whole (~22,000/~65,000).
I agree with this 100%. I rather have a handful of II from which I know I have a good shot (40-50% A rate) rather than a lot of interviews with less of a shot at each (20%-30% A rate).
Of course. We all would. But that's not the point.
Specifically because it seems that extra IIs were largely given to late applicants, I would have wished for fewer IIs at the beginning of this process as I knew I would be an early applicant. However, if I had no IIs right now, then of course I would be hoping for more IIs.
I didn't read it that way. My understanding was that schools were extremely backed up last year, and so-called "late" applicants, in most cases, were applicants who were reviewed late, but did not necessarily submit late. In fact, there were plenty of sob stories from people who were under the misguided impression that submitting later than usual would be fine under the circumstances (encouraged in many cases by SDN adcoms), and then found themselves shut out due to the unexpected deluge of applications.
Hmm. Good point. I submitted all my secondaries in July, yet my last interview was on December 28th.
Iirc you got some interviews at top school this cycle and the past cycle. Why do you think that none of them materialized last cycle? This is what worries me most about the process. Seems like somebody can have 5+ IIs and not get in
I'm not the best person to use as an example for that. I've had my goals set on a T10 (or T30 with scholarship) since I began my undergrad. My application was largely steller with one major caveat: no clinical experience in the US. I still got 3 interviews from schools ranked almost T10, T30, and T50. I knew my clinical deficiency was easy to fix, and I knew that if accepted to medical school I could never reapply (blacklisted). I also was facing a family crisis at the time, that could have made attending medical school a bit of a pain. On top of that, I found the perfect dermatology gap year job for my future residency application (custom made for me by the Dermatology department at the T50 school) as I am certain I want to pursue derm. So I chose to withdraw from the T30 and T50 school prior to decision, and I was waitlisted at the T10 which I interviewed at in December so I was probably an edge case candidate anyway.
