Criteria in ranking applicants post iv?

[kev2180]

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I am just curious to know whether scores are taken into account during the ranking of applicants after IV. I realize that scores can get you IVs. But a lot of people keep saying that scores dont matter in psychiatry once you get an interview?...Is that really true?

 

[psychattending]

I am just curious to know whether scores are taken into account during the ranking of applicants after IV. I realize that scores can get you IVs. But a lot of people keep saying that scores dont matter in psychiatry once you get an interview?...Is that really true?

I, of course, can't comment on what other programs do. Here we look at all aspects of the applicant when doing our rankings. Cognitive ability in addition to other aspects of an applicant, e.g. personality, character, and maturity, all are taken into account when ranking an applicant. We don't use formulae or any formalized system. We just put applicants down in the order that we would prefer to have them in our program.

 

[whopper]

It seems to me that every program may have their own way on doing this. I've never seen a PD call each other and compare notes on this in an organized and systemic manner. In fact I've seen some PDs know quite a bit about medicine and psychiatry, but very little about the conducting an admission process which may have been a completely foreign thing to them until they did their first one as a PD. (I've noticed several doctors lack executive skills you'd obtain in business or other fields).

My own program did filter applicants using scores, the content of their personal statements, and LORs. After the interview, people were ranked based on a combination of factors, but scores were not put at the top of the criteria.

A candidate showing a healthy passion for psychiatry was one of the best things to see. Candidates who we knew were good and smart workers were also something that propelled them to the top.

I was actually surprised to see that scores didn't seem to matter much after the person got an interview.

This can all change. With the larger number of applicants into psychiatry, I'd wager that more programs are going to filter out more people with lower scores. Scores aren't the most important, nor the only thing that matters. In our ultra-competitive, hyper educated field it may sometimes seem so. It may seem that way to medical students because their last frame of reference in the medical field was the medical school admission process which is far more competitive and score based. Nonetheless, scores still are an important factor.

 

[gdbaby]

I, of course, can't comment on what other programs do. Here we look at all aspects of the applicant when doing our rankings. Cognitive ability in addition to other aspects of an applicant, e.g. personality, character, and maturity, all are taken into account when ranking an applicant. We don't use formulae or any formalized system. We just put applicants down in the order that we would prefer to have them in our program.

Do you do this after each interview session or on some designated day when you make the entire rank order list? If it is the latter, how do you remember the applicants who interviewed in November or even December? It seems like it would be to your advantage to interview in January.

 

[OldPsychDoc]

Do you do this after each interview session or on some designated day when you make the entire rank order list? If it is the latter, how do you remember the applicants who interviewed in November or even December? It seems like it would be to your advantage to interview in January.

As I attempted to describe in this post a couple of months ago, our solution is to collect evaluations on the interview day which are a combination of analog ranking scales and subjective comments. I think it tends to negate the memory decay for those we interviewed in October vs. January. We can then start our ranking meeting with a preliminary rank-order based on those evals, review the scores and comments via ppt slides with the applicant's pictures, and move onward from there. (Also, knowing our collleagues and who is a "hard grader" or what characteristics they tend to key in on vs. another interviewer helps us get a feel for what an applicant we didn't personally interview might be like.)