In this topic we talk about how the admissions process could be improved

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2) Go to the Chinese system where people are accepted to pysician training programs straight out of HS, and then can fail out if they're not good enough, or stop at a mid-point in their training cycle and still have some right to practice.

The problem with this is cost. The whole reason why medical admissions is so selective and they work so hard to graduate you is the fact that they really can't afford to lose matriculants. It is a huge time and financial commitment to train physicians in the US. I can't offer a source, but I've heard that the behind the scenes costs of training a doctor ends up at around a half million.

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Allow grade replacement.

Some people were NOT bent on going to med school in college, so may not have had the motivation to get the 3.9.

Allowing grade replacement would give, in my opinion, a better idea of the person's stats, and what the person is capable of actually doing, when they actually were serious about going to med school. And I believe in second chances.

Also, we should be required to have a letter from a supervisor at the place where we volunteered... whether you want it or not. As a 2 year supervisor at a volunteer internship, I have seen thousands of people come in and go. Some of the worst and stupidest people have gotten into top tier med schools that completely did not deserve it (ie. falsifying hours, not letting nurses use the computer b/c he wanted to sign up for classes, never showing up for shifts, talking back to and down on patients, giving NPO patients food..... etc...).

We had one volunteer who lied about all his shifts, then when we kicked him out of the program, he brought his mom who informed as that her son is an amazing 4.0 student and did not deserve getting kicked out. And he got into one of the best schools in the country.

I shudder knowing that some of this bimbos are going to be doing surgery on people.

and.. AND.. MOST IMPORTANTLY:
NOT letting children of the head of some surgery department in the med school attend with a 1.5gpa and 15 mcat.
And YES I've seen it happen... personally. Not Cool. And Not Fair.
 
Oh... and there should be an addition of a few public health courses among the pre-med requirements... replacing math which is quite useless, once you understand the basic stuff.

Making premeds do some public health will be good for them, especially if med schools really want a push in the direction of preventive medicine and primary care and crank out more doctors that really understand what healthcare actually means. I propose classes such as these:

1. Health policy (so that premeds have SOME notion of what Medicare/Medicaid is)
2. Medical ethics (there is more to this subject than abortion and stem cell research I can tell you)
3. Disparities in healthcare access (what leads patients to not receive proper and adequate healthcare)
4. Culture and effects on health (because each patient has a history and a background, and is not a petri dish with a number on their wrist)

there are a lot more but my brain is dead from staring at my MCAT book for 4 hours.
 
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Grade replacement policies.
Accepting some psychology/anthro courses as science gpa. I mean abnormal psychology and developmental psychology are super biological based.
Maybe put some clinical knowledge on the mcat? I mean clinical capacity is all that matters in the long run.
I also think that personal experiences should matter a lot. Ability to speak another language should get some brownie points.
 
I don't know if this was mentioned yet. I think the biggest part of what makes this process so nerve-wracking for applicants is the uncertainty of when you might hear decisions (pre or post interview). Some schools are very good about it (especially post interview). They give you a specific date/week when you will definitely get a decision. It should be adopted more widely.
 
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you dont get do-overs on the wards. why would adcoms respect grade replacement?
 
Start screening secondaries (all of them), if someone has numbers below your interview cut-off, stop sending them secondaries and wasting everyone's time and money
 
The problem with this is cost. The whole reason why medical admissions is so selective and they work so hard to graduate you is the fact that they really can't afford to lose matriculants. It is a huge time and financial commitment to train physicians in the US. I can't offer a source, but I've heard that the behind the scenes costs of training a doctor ends up at around a half million.

that might be close to what we cough up as well.
 
Volunteering should be optional. It's a ******ed waste of time that has absolutely nothing to do with medicine. I don't want to prove that I'm an altruistic person because guess what, I'm not an altruistic person.
 
The interview to acceptance ratio should not be over 4:1. If it is your school needs to do a better job screening candidates.


YES! schools like duke, columbia, harvard, washU etc, dont need to interview 20% of their applicants. this just makes for very expensive rejections in the end. many schools with MORE seats than those schools interview LESS people. and i don't like the BS argument that this gives more people a chance, because plenty of people who interview very well (or think they did) just get rejected in the end.
 
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i could be wrong here, but i think the stats-only approach was what they took in the 80s or something, and it didn't make good doctors, hence the switch to the current approach.

What do you mean it didn't make good doctors, what is wrong with docs who trained in the 80's? You may want to lose this attitude as most senior attendings and heads of dept. that you will encounter probably trained then.
 
and.. AND.. MOST IMPORTANTLY:
NOT letting children of the head of some surgery department in the med school attend with a 1.5gpa and 15 mcat.
And YES I've seen it happen... personally. Not Cool. And Not Fair.


I've seen it, too, and I agree, it needs to end.
l
I don't agree with limiting the number of offers that can be held concurrently. In some cases, an applicant is holding those offers waiting for a significant other to get an admission offer or job offer that will drive the matriculation decision.

Screening before secondary seems like a good idea but I recall a guy who ended up AOA (medical honor society) who didn't get a secondary and who had to appeal that decision!
 
Screening before secondary seems like a good idea but I recall a guy who ended up AOA (medical honor society) who didn't get a secondary and who had to appeal that decision!

of course mistakes will be made here and there. but more stringent screening will save money on sec fees + less interviews will save on travel/hassle.

on top of that, a rejection pre-sec or post-sec is much less heartbreaking than a rej post-interview
 
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of course mistakes will be made here and there. but more stringent screening will save money on sec fees + less interviews will save on travel/hassle.

on top of that, a rejection pre-sec or post-sec is much less heartbreaking than a rej post-interview

good luck getting schools to agree to more pre secondary rejections. its free money for them. Quick math, 12000 applications X $100 per app = 1.2 MILLION dollars
 
of course mistakes will be made here and there. but more stringent screening will save money on sec fees + less interviews will save on travel/hassle.

on top of that, a rejection pre-sec or post-sec is much less heartbreaking than a rej post-interview

Screen yourself. That's why I promoted the formula gpa(10) + MCAT to help applicants compare their stats to the averages at target schools.


Adcoms have a hard time... on the one hand, we see people we like the first week of interviews and it would be great to offer admission to 90% of them but we wonder about the applicants we'll see in the 10th week or the season and the 15th week.... Some schools hold all the decisions until the end so as to pick the very cream of the crop but if all schools did that then applicants would have to do even more interviews to assure one offer; at least the way it is now, students can quit interviewing or withdraw some applications after getting an early in the cycle offer.

My adcom has a hard time with waitist vs. reject. Despite what some of you are reporting here, they think that it is more respectful to say, you are good and we'd like you here if we had the space rather than saying "reject!". It seems some of you would rather be put out of your misery. Many people withdraw from the waitlist because they have an offer elsewhere and are happy to go on with things. So, some schools need a huge waitlist because after all those withdrawals happen, the group left "waiting" is actually quite small and couldn't have been predicted in advance. (aside from rejecting the best of those who would otherwise go on the waitlist because "they're sure to have offers elsewhere").

Structuring medical admissions to be fair, efficient, and efficacious in selecting a talented and happy* class is very challenging.

*Students who are a good fit with a school's philosophy are going to be happy students.
 
Heres the history of medical school admissions in a nut shell:

1960: high scoring applicants awarded admission to selected medical school.
1970: high scoring applicants awarded admission to selected medical school.
1980: high scoring applicants awarded admission to selected medical school.
1990: High scoring applicants now make up the Admissions Counsel, figure that high scores are only one aspect to a person, start awarding admissions to people with variety of interests.
2000: Mediocre scoring applicants with rounded experiences awarded admission to selected medical school.
2010: high scoring applicants with well rounded experiences awarded admission to selected medical school.
2020: high scoring applicants with well rounded experiences awarded admission to selected medical school.
2030: high scoring applicants with well rounded experiences awarded admission to selected medical school.
2040: Admission counsel now made up of high scoring applicants with well rounded experience figure an individual should save the world first before they are admitted.
2050: No one is awarded admission to medical school. World ends after super-uber rhino-flu infects a little child in the heart of manhatten (after going to the zoo) and he sneezes in a crowded subway station on his way home.
 
Heres the history of medical school admissions in a nut shell:

1960: high scoring applicants awarded admission to selected medical school.
1970: high scoring applicants awarded admission to selected medical school.
1980: high scoring applicants awarded admission to selected medical school.
1990: High scoring applicants now make up the Admissions Counsel, figure that high scores are only one aspect to a person, start awarding admissions to people with variety of interests.
2000: Mediocre scoring applicants with rounded experiences awarded admission to selected medical school.
2010: high scoring applicants with well rounded experiences awarded admission to selected medical school.
2020: high scoring applicants with well rounded experiences awarded admission to selected medical school.
2030: high scoring applicants with well rounded experiences awarded admission to selected medical school.
2040: Admission counsel now made up of high scoring applicants with well rounded experience figure an individual should save the world first before they are admitted.
2050: No one is awarded admission to medical school. World ends after super-uber rhino-flu infects a little child in the heart of manhatten (after going to the zoo) and he sneezes in a crowded subway station on his way home.


HAHHAHAAHAHA. Thank you. I needed that. HAHAHAHHAHAAHAHA
:rofl::rofl::rofl:
 
I've seen it, too, and I agree, it needs to end.
l

And the most amusing thing is that these kids talk about it to all their friends, as if it's perfectly normal. Really.. smart creatures they are.

The girl I know who got in because of said reasons told us during dinner one day, and was emphasizing how nice it was to not have to study for anything and know you have a seat reserved for you. And she pitied the rest of us who were spending weeks on end losing sleep over this whole process.

I don't think the rest of us digested anything that night.
 
I've posted this before and it got some pretty negative responses, but I think schools should consider following Duke's lead and allow webcam interviews. With the technology getting more reliable, there's no need for students to waste money and time traveling to interviews. You can show off the hospital/promote your school at second look (or second looks, whatever) and this will also save on the effort required by the schools to put on interview days.
 
I've posted this before and it got some pretty negative responses, but I think schools should consider following Duke's lead and allow webcam interviews. With the technology getting more reliable, there's no need for students to waste money and time traveling to interviews. You can show off the hospital/promote your school at second look (or second looks, whatever) and this will also save on the effort required by the schools to put on interview days.

I'd love this. It would also avoid dragging warm-weather applicants to a colder climate for the interview... the second look always occurs during nicer weather.... we can really pull a fast one on them with the old web cam interview. :smuggrin:
 
I wish med-schools recruited pre-meds the way the University of Texas recruits football players.
 
I think the admissions process is quite effective at enabling schools to assemble the type of class they desire. The only change I would make is eliminating the secondary. Add two or three more questions to the primary such as "What hardships have you overcome?", "How would you contribute to the diversity of the entering class?" and "What are you looking for in a medical school?". This would force applicants to be transparent instead of spinning their secondary to fit each school, as well as saving time and money. If adcomms can't figure out from the primary, along with a few more in depth questions such as these, if they want to interview someone then they should be replaced.
 
I was thinking about this some more today and I realized that my criticisms stem from the tendency of many people (including myself) to prefer subjectivity. Fit, social skills, "well-roundedness" and such are all definitely very important, but hard to nail down. One thing that has struck me across several different threads, I believe LizzyM mentioned it, as did a few other people, is the idea that a school's mission statement should give a hint as to what sort of person they are really looking for. However, it's most certainly difficult to define what sort of people get along well at a school. Not to mention the silly thought of gunners showing off their acting skills at each different interview =P Maybe the clubs you find at a school really hint at what sort of person goes there?
 
I think they should adopt a more systematic and efficient NRMP-like system. Not that I've experienced that yet, but it just sounds better. :rolleyes:
 
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