Can you elaborate some more please?
Unimportant factors:
Curriculum, research opportunities (there will always be top people at most good schools to work with or do research with), match lists (more a factor of individual preferences than anything to do with the school)
PBL/CBL seem awesome in concept but can suck really really bad in practice if people aren't prepared or at the same level of understanding.
Any top 25 school (and probably even ones below that level) have super prestigious top researchers on their faculty if you want to get involved in that, there might be a higher concentration of them at major research universities, but it shouldn't be a reason for making a decision unless you're MSTP.
Match lists aren't very useful for analytical purposes. So your school matched 7 people into derm? That seems impressive unless 30 people wanted to match into it and 23 didn't get in. A more useful statistic would be the internal #s from each school for percentage of people accepted in each speciality/program and even that isn't that useful because it doesn't address the reasons/factors that affect their experiences.
Important factors:
Whether schools capture lectures (esp with video), supportiveness of administration, classmates and school culture, SCHOOL FACILITIES, GRADING SYSTEM, LOCATION.
Attending every lecture is a good idea in concept but it doesn't always work out that way. You're going to spend the majority of your life for at least the first two years with your classmates, better hope they're people you want to spend time with! A supportive culture is key for the same reason. Same goes for facilities. I really appreciate our awesome facilities after the past two weeks spending 100+ hours here studying for exams. Grading system is key, pass/fail systems will make med school a much better experience for you, although I think having one year of grades is a good thing because otherwise your clinical year determines your entire grade profile for med school. H/P/F is the same thing as grades, don't let it fool you. Location should be the most important factor in making decisions for any number of reasons. 1) You have to live there for four years 2) proximity and exposure to local faculty/hospitals 3) familiarity of regional residency programs to your school.
