I keep seeing and hearing the same thing over and over whenever I listen to a med school panel or talk to admissions people. They say that they take a holistic approach when looking at applicants.. But their numbers seem to say otherwise. Almost everyone I know that got into a top20 school had a 3.7+ and above a 32.
The only exception is a friend of mine who's Mexican. He had like a 3.4-3.5, 4 years of research w/ 1 pub, average MCAT, got into UCLA UCD Meharry and Weil-Cornell
Do med schools mean it when they say theyre "holistic", or do they just place primary emphasis on metrics and then move on to the other parts of the app?
I want you to imagine this:
You have 50 medical school spots available at your top school. You know that whoever you accept is likely to come. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that your stats are stacking up like this:
You have 500 applicants with GPAs between 3.8-4 and MCATs between 515-530. (Group A)
You have 500 applicants with GPAs between 3.6-3.8 and MCATs between 510-520. (Group B)
You have 500 applicants with GPAs between 3.4-3.6 and MCATs between 508-515. (Group C)
You have 500 applicants with GPAs between 3.2-3.4 and MCATs between 500-508. (Group D)
In each group, about a quarter of the applicants have stellar extracurricular experiences, half have average (similar to everyone else in your application group) experiences, and a quarter have extracurricular experiences that don't match up.
Doing the math, you have 125 people from Group A you already want to interview. They have great stats and extracurricular experiences, so "holistically," they're absolutely fantastic applicants. Of those 250 people in group B with amazing stats and average extracurriculars, you decide you want to just interview 50 of them.
Do the same for all of the groups, and you have a total of around 700 people you may want to interview for a total of 50 spots. However, you already know that you're more likely to take a stellar person from group A than from group C or D, so you may dismiss a good number of the stellar group C and D people.
After the interview, you figure out that only about 75 people from group A met your expectations, so you accept all of them. 75 from each other group met your expectations and you'd like to accept them, but you want to prioritize the prospective students from group A because,
holistically, in other words, including both their stats and their extracurricular activities, they are superior to those in the other groups, so you accept a few from the other groups.
To make a long story short, holistic doesn't mean "ignoring stats." It means taking the whole application into account when making decisions. This means that people with high stats continue to have a leg up no matter what you do.
And I will gladly donate to my alma mater in the future 
