Criteria for AOA???

[PACtoDOC]

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Can you MD types tell a DO student colleague what your criteria for selection to AOA is? Is the selection unbiased and standardized across the country? There is debate in the DO community that our honor society is not standardizing admission, making it so that top students can't even get in. If you are interested, see the thread in the osteopathic forum about this. I appreciate your responses in advance.

 

[Brewster]

There are only two hard and fast rules for AOA admission:
1) The student must be in the top 25% of his/her class.
2) The school cannot induct more than 1/6 of the class.

Some schools make it entirely academic based (ie, the top 1/6 of class is admitted). Other schools include criteria such as community service and have an election (by faculty and/or AOA members).

Of course, determining who is in the top of the class is kind of dicey since most schools don't track GPAs. At my school, they determine class rank (for AOA purposes) based on Step I score and third year grades.

 

[nuttymcpoonut]

I was told by a member of the selection committee at my school that AOA (for my school) is based almost completely on grades. Since our first year is P/F, they only take into consideration second year and third year. Third year is counted twice as strongly as second year. Top 10% of the class get it.

However, I was also told that if there was an exceptional student that, for example, ran our school's free clinic, but was only in the top 15%, they would probably bump someone off.

I hope this helps.

 

[gizzdogg]

Obviously from these and other posts the third year grades are key to AOA election and residency matching. So how arbitrary and subjective are clerkship grades? And on what factors are these grades usually based? In other words, if you're competent and you bust your ass on the rotations, can you still get screwed simply because you don't click with the faculty members?