Internal preclinical rankings- how much should we stress about them?

[NY_Med]

I was just curious how much we should stress out about preclinical years at our school if they take part in P/F (with preclinical internal rankings)? It sounds like they use a quartile system that they "include" in the dean's letter. What exactly do these rankings entail? And can they really negatively affect you if you aren't high?

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[Redpancreas]

The two are mutually exclusive. You can't call yourself P/F and still have internal rankings presented in the dean's letter. Residency programs will use any and all data provided to them. They like to know everything they can about your academic record because to them strong past performance = future reliability.

The things residency programs will care about when you're applying in no particular order are your Step 2 CK score, your performance on rotations, and some idea of how you did relative to your peers. Step 2 CK is a score and is straight forward as is your performance on rotations as it's usually some honors vs. high pass vs. pass system.

The third factor (how you do relative to your peers) is what you're asking about and it's where things get unpredictable. The first element of unpredictabilityis that each school has their own system to calculate a class rank/internal rankings or whatever. Some places do it with weightage on your M3 more than M1/2, some weigh equally, etc. etc. The problem with thinking about this is you won't know your strengths and where you possibly will excel until you matriculate into a school and make it through a few exams as medicine exams are different from physics and organic chemistry exams. The only thing in my mind you can really do to benefit yourself is shoot high for a school with a brand/reputation that can afford to simply not have an internal ranking system where all the programs see are your step scores, honors on rotations, and written evals (which are generally good).

I think this is a good read. I wrote it a while ago:

Insight into Pre-Medical Decisions from a Resident (factors in choosing a school, life outlook, etc)

Hey SDN Pre-Med Community, I'm now a resident physician and would like to type up a bit about some things I wished I'd known when applying. Forgive me if some of this stuff is now obvious. I know the stakes get higher every year and as a result, pre-meds are becoming more and more knowledgeable...

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