It's a month long online course SGU puts you in if there's a flag in your numbers (ie, MCAT or GPA). It covers basic sciences with weekly quizzes and a final. Pass (I think with a 3.5, I have to look over my paperwork again) and you place right into 1st semester. Fail, and you're put into Charters.
I believe that this is a way they are trying to reduce the failure rate/criticism about too many students being offered spots, and then failing out when they couldn't hack the material. It is perhaps a way to identify academic problems before they become financial ones. Hopefully this will allay some of the criticism about "
all you need is a heartbeat and a checkbook" to enroll that you often hear from the (mostly pre-med) naysayers. But, for many it will prove to be a dead end street (perhaps critics will say those people shouldn't be doctors anyway).
However, and having said that, I think that if such a program had been mandated to me (in 2001), I probably would be doing something else with my life right now. Or, it actually might have motivated me to take the extra time and try harder to get into a U.S. school. Hard to say at this point; the die has been cast.
For what its worth, I took the MCAT a
long time ago (early 1990's) and scored a 28. My science GPA was around a 3.2. I was a marginal applicant who'd been out of school for a while but who'd also matured a lot. I was faced with either returning to school in my early 30's and trying to get my grades up slightly and retaking the MCAT trying to get to the magic 30+, or going to the Caribbean. After a lot of research, it's obvious what I chose.
When I started looking into "alternative pathways" (remember the Internet was burgeoning at the time but the information available then is a far cry from what is available now), all of the schools I contacted, except for Ross, wanted me to re-take the MCAT. Ross was just beginning to require MCAT scores (something they hadn't done previously) and were willing to accept that score despite it being outside what they (and other schools) would normally consider an "acceptable" timeframe. Right or wrong and agree with me or not, that right there is essentially why I went to Ross instead of St. George's or one of the Mexican schools (along with the 5th pathway hassle I didn't want to deal with). In the end, it worked out for me.
Interestingly, Ross actually started the MERP program while I was there. Honestly, if Ross had MERP'd me, I'd probably be doing something else with my life right now...
That's the 100% truth. Hard to say whether or not I would've chosen this career had the situation or timing been different. Just glad that Ross took that old score. The rest is history, so to speak.
-Skip