I discuss my personal experience with late vs. early applications
here.
If your credentials are not strong, the timing won't make that much of a difference....As such, I would say, yes, the folks on the cusp benefit from being early, but the strongest applicants will do fine at the end as well.
I would suggest, though, that the need to apply early sometimes gets overblown on SDN. When you get to med school, you will see that many, many of your classmates took the August MCAT or otherwise applied fairly late in the process. It's not like strong applicants don't get in at the end too.
I disagree. I think my stats as described in the link above are relatively strong (could be better, but they're alright) and so are my ECs. But my results from two different years were hugely different without any change in my credentials except that everything was one year older and my applications were timed differently (of course, I was at the extremes of applying in the last couple days of AMCAS last year and the first couple of days this year).
Not all schools are rolling. The top schools definitely are not.
Even though some of the well-known 'elite' schools (Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, etc.) say they are non-rolling, my personal belief is that they are really just secretly rolling. I know from the dean of admissions at one of those schools that the committee meets weekly to decide on the interviews of the week before. Obviously, if you are interviewing hundreds of kids, you're not going to wait until March to go through all of them and make decisions; rather, they make them along the way and then give out their acceptances all in one batch. That may mean that they reserve a certain number of acceptances per week until at the end of the interview process they fill up 100 total acceptance, send those out in March, get the responses to those offers, and then more on to their second tier candidates, but that process is not much different than that of some rolling schools like Case Western, which hold off on giving out too many acceptances early on. Thus, if those elite school were kinder, they might free up more acceptance spots at other schools by accepting their weekly favorites as they go so that those kids don't hold on to offers from other schools as they wait for the elite schools to get back to them. Anyway, the bottom line still seems to me that even at these schools that profess to be non-rolling, they still make decisions as they go, they're just not transparent about it. Does that impact the chances of the late applicant? I think to some extent it might if those non-rolling schools periodically re-evaluate the applications they've already received in the context of the later applications, thus allowing the earlier applications to be viewed more times, with more chances to be put into the 'interview' pile. Obviously, 40s, 3.9s, years of volunteering in the Dominican, and groundbreaking publications are going to help you break through whether you apply in July or December, but most applicants (contrary to popular SDN lore) don't have such accolades.
If school's were truly 'non-rolling,' they would gather applications until December, cease to accept applications, go through all the material, make interview decisions, interview from January to March (inclusive), then have series of committee meetings in which they review all interviewed applicants and vote. I can (presumptuously) guarantee that no school does that.
That's my dime.
