How do AdComs make a final decision?

Cow pattie bingo. Well, at least that's how UC Davis does it.

 

Good question, I think it absolutely must depend on the school.

 

They flip a freakin coin. Pretty lame I think.

 

hahahaha. I knew there had to be a reason why they put a med school out there!

 

No, no, no. The reason they need anb AdCom is it takes at least a few people to work a ouija board. (Come on, you can picture it. "Spirits, Should we give this guy an interview?" A, B, S, O, L, U, T, E, L, Y, N, O, T)

 

As has been discussed ad naseum on the VCU thread and such, VCU uses a point system, the ad comms vote, score gets averaged, take people off the top. 'SC has a committee voting system. In order to be admitted the vote must be unanimous. If the vote is anything but unanimous, you get a waitlist spot, don't know how their waitlist works exactly tho, when they get back to it, etc. Those are the only two systems I remember being explained to me. The others are all mysterious black boxes.

 

Pin the acceptance on the application. ala pin the tail on the donkey.

Or darts.

Then again, perhaps they just spread the applications on the floor, let in a pack of rabid cats, and whatever applications are still intact and not soiled are accepted.

 

Someone posted that Wake Forest has a scoring system and you need a certian score to be accepted and a certian score to even be considered for the waitlist.

Univ of Miami has a voting system and each committee member votes then they discuss how the vote turned out and make sure everyone agrees on the final decision before finalizing it.

USF has one or two people present an applicant to the committee and then I think they vote.

UF - not too sure; i do know my interviewer said he had little do with whether I was accepted or not. I think the interviewers make recommendations and then the committee votes. They did tell us they only accept about 2 people from each interview day, then accept a few more before christ., but accept the bulk of their class in March.

Georgetown - Told us they go through batches of 100 applications at a time and every committee member votes.

FSU - Has one big committee meeting and then a week later has a smaller committee meeting.

Those are all I can remember details from. It seems every school I have interviewed at has had some sort of voting/scoring system.

I am not sure how much interviews matter. I think if you have a bad interview it will keep you out but I am not sure how much having a good interview helps. I think different schools weigh the interview differently.

While your are there on interview day, if they don't tell you, ask what the next step is and if all the interviewers are voting members of the committee, how many committee members are there, is it a point system, how many do they accept early, how many have they accepted off their waitlist in the past, etc.

 

How does the adcom make decisions: with great humility and a little angst.

As you know, I don't want to say where I'm from but a good interview will give you a boost and a bad interview will kill your chances.

That said, about 9-12 committee members read the application and/or the notes from two committee members who have read the application thoroughly before the interview plus the notes written by the interviewers. Each committee member assigns a score. If there is a vast discrepency among the scores assigned to one applicant, this might be discussed and members are given a chance to change the score (doesn't happen often). There are three such adcoms each specializing in a group of schools.

A smaller executive committee comprizing members from each of the adcoms reviews a list of the applicants with their scores. The top of the list gets invites, the middle gets waitlisted, the bottom is denied admission. There is a little fuzziness at the margins -- if everyone with a score of x or higher is getting admission and there are 3 applicants that are fraction less than the "admit score" the one applicant with a special circumstance (URM, legacy, etc) might get an offer but not the other two. Most of the discussion then centers around those that are being offered admission (or waitlist) outside of the strict numeric order of the list.

 

I am guessing for each file they take a shot. And they keep rejecting until they reach a file and a shot when they vomit. At that point the file which has been vomited on is dried and the person is sent an acceptance.

 

Lizzy, I realize you probably can't comment on this, (because you don't have my application and each case is unique) but how do you decide who gets an interview? I'm getting no interview love so I'd like to improve my application, but everyone says, "Don't ask us if you don't get an interview - we have too many rejected applicants to spend that much time on you." And that seems fair.
Just curious, that's all.

 

they sit in a circle and meditate while breathing in fumes from ceremonial incense. then the chairman scatters bones and begins to decipher the meaning of their orientation while the vice chairman leads the committee in a ritualistic chant. each school has different scented incense and slightly different chants, as dicatated by the schools' respective founding fathers, but the common practice among all schools is the scattering of the bones.

 

i'm wondering how pre-interview rejections are made?
i'm sure the process is different from post-interview decisions.

 

at the University of MN-Twin Cities, two committee members look over your file including the interviewers notes. Both make their own decision, accept, hold decision/waitlist, reject. If both say accept, then you get accepted, if one says accept and the other something else, you are voted on in the adcom meeting.

 

How do you guys know so much of what goes on in the admissions committee meetings?

 

I'm God. I don't know how everyone else gets their information though...

 

I arrived at my conclusion through logical reasoning and deductive arguments and some sparse moments of crippling idiocy.....okay mostly crippling idiocy.

 

They told us at the interview.

 

well, god, i've been praying for an acceptance and more interviews. what's the holdup???!!

 

I know wisconsin has a point system, you need above a certain point to be invited for a secondary. Based on your secondary you earn more points, or don't, and this determines if you get invited for an interview, and same also after your interview. After your interview your whole application- including interview- is reviewed and those that looked over your application/interviewers decide if you will be accepted or not. Points are designated based on grades (>3.8 get extra points), MCAT (> 30 gets extra points), # and quality of extracurriculars, strength of essays, poise,etc.

UMN works in a simililiar fashion, two reviewers decide if you will get a seconadry, those two same people decide based on your secondary, letters, etc, decide if you will be invited for an interview. Your interviewer is different from your reviewers. Interviwer hands notes to reviewers and these two people make a cse for you to the ad com.

Got info from inside sources (people actually on both of these admissions committees)

 

Is there anything that would make for a bad interview that may not be obvious?

Do you expect thank you emails/letters?

Thanks.

 

The interviewers write up their comments long before your thank you note arrives (as in 5 minutes after you leave the room). By the time the thank you note arrives, the decision regarding the points allotted to your appie has been made. Still, it is the polite thing to do.

On the matter of who gets interviews.... each application is read completely by at least one adcom member who gives it 20-30 minutes, evaluating grades & scores, personal statements, LORs, and ECs. This reviewer writes a paragraph summarizing the appie and making a recommendation (interview/no interview). A second adcom member reviews the review, reads the application less thoroughly, and either seconds the recommendation of the first reviewer (interview or no interview) or contradicts it. Then it goes to a third layer of review that takes into account the written comments and the recommendations of the first 2 reviewers. As many as 85% of the applicants don't get an interview so this is where the very hard decisions must be made. Basically each layer of review is expected to cut in half to 1/3 the number of applicants judged worthy of an interview (100%-50%-25%-15%).

What one school is looking for (many shadowing experiences) may be different from another school (focus on scholarly activity particularly research). If you aren't getting any love from a variety of schools you may have set your sights too high (are your scores >= school's average), you may be missing the ECs they look for, your essays may be really bad or your LORs include something very damning.

 

To be on the safe side, I asked all my LOR writers if they could write me a strong letter, and they said yes. But do you really see LOR's with "damning" info in them? How common is this?

 

Lizzy,

Thanks for the inside information.

REL,

If you see this post, could you please make any comments regarding your experience with the same issue??

It seems to me that it is kinda hard to really know what individual schools do because most of how they decide is kept hush hush with the exception of a few tidbits.

I know Miami has this point system, but they use it only to rank you. Once you are ranked, and have been interviewed, I don't know what they do from there.

 

Thanks, Lizzy! AdCom love is the messiest kind. I tried to apply to "lower tier schools" but I may have set the bar a bit high. We'll (ok, exclusively me) see how this application cycle goes and if I can jump over that bar - and now at least I've got a better idea of what parts of my app to work on.
Thanks, again!

 

Hopefully nothing like in the novel The Invisible Man.

LizzyM,
Thanks a ton. I'll just send a short thank you.

 

After you interview at Miami each committee member votes electronically. Then the committee meets to go over the applicants and make sure everyone agrees with the decision made based on the voting. If people don't agree they discuss the applicant further. At least that is what I was told.

Has anyone heard anything different?

 

I heard they play a massive game of beer pong where each adcom member represents a group of applicants. Whoever wins in the end gets his applicants accepted. The problem is, by the end they are all really drunk so some people who weren't intended to get in get lucky invites.

 

Asking if they can write a strong letter is very good advice, TDS.

It isn't common to see a bad LOR but when you see one --

More often, you have someone who points out that the student was quiet in class, never came to office hours, didn't take an interest in the material but did well on the exams. Or you get the impression that the student was a total pain, obsessed with grades and constantly on the professor's back. If the adcom person is a basic science prof, they read that and wonder if they want a student like that in their classroom next year.