westsidespartan said:
I humbly disagree. If that were the case, why would more competitive specialties, like Derm or Ortho, have such a high Ranks/Position ratio? It seems they wouldn't have to rank very many at all to fill their program.
My guess is that it refers to the number of applicants that rank a position. For example, if a program has 10 positions, and Ranks/Position ratio of 8, that means 80 people ranked that program, which is probably pretty close to the number of interviews that program granted. In other words, just about everyone that interviews probably ranks it somewhere in their ROL, especially in the more competitive specialties.
I agree that, at first glance, it would seem strange for competitive specialties to rank so many. However, I think there may be other factors at play that could explain it. Just because a specialty ranks a lot of people doesn't make it less competitive. There are additional factors at play that we may not be considering. For example, perhaps it's very hard to get interviews in derm, but once you get to the interview level, all the derm programs are interviewing the same small group of applicants. There would therefore be a great deal of overlap, and if most derm programs rank the same top 5-10, they may need relatively longer lists in case those top applicants end up elsewhere. I have no idea how true any of this is, but my point is that I don't know if the data on this table capture the whole picture.
Anyway, I do think the explanation you gave makes some sense as well. Before my other post, because I couldn't convince myself strongly of either your definition or the one I propsed, I decided to see if the NRMP defined "ranks/position" anywhere on their site. That's when I found this:
http://www.nrmp.org/res_match/about_res/impact.html. Here, they are trying to prove a different point, but they show their data in two tables: one for program lists and one for applicant lists. As you can see, when they are referring to the length of program lists in relation to their # of positions, they title the column "average ranks/position," the exact same wording as used in the table we were discussing. When they refer to the number of ranks applicants made, they title the column "average length of ROLs." So, I thought it very likely that they would use consistent labeling for all of their data, hence my previous explanation. Of course, it's also possible that they just happen to have two different things labeled similarly.
But in the end does it even matter? I personally feel that the data on this page is not really going to tell us what we want to know, as it depends on how far down the list a program goes and how competitive the applicant is. Moreover, this data doesn't indicate how many ranks it takes to match in each specialty. What do others think?
