Match list vs. PD ranking?

[obscurecomplimenter]

Hi everyone,

One factor everyone cites for judging between schools is by taking a look at the match lists. However, about a year ago someone also posted a full list of program director (PD) rankings for each school.

When it comes to more mid-tier schools, I've noticed a discrepancy between these two metrics. For instance, a school will have a relatively low PD ranking, but based on match lists seems to do quite well in the match (consistently placing people year-after-year into top residency programs) -- and vice versa.

Can anyone comment on how to reconcile this discrepancy, and how much weight should be placed on one vs. the other? I'm not even sure where the PD ranking comes from exactly.

Obviously with brand-new / newer programs, I can see why there'd be a discrepancy. I'm more talking about long-established programs here.

Thanks!

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[ihoop24]

Tbh, you shouldn't really be focused on match lists. You pretty much have no idea what the interests of those students is or where they want to match. There could be people who wanted to do rural primary care that looks like a "bad match" however it was their top choice. Also, people have said that the PD rankings are pretty bias and don't hold as much weight.

 

[obscurecomplimenter]

Tbh, you shouldn't really be focused on match lists. You pretty much have no idea what the interests of those students is or where they want to match. There could be people who wanted to do rural primary care that looks like a "bad match" however it was their top choice. Also, people have said that the PD rankings are pretty bias and don't hold as much weight.

I'm definitely not placing all that much weight on match lists, particularly because my interests don't lie in the competitive specialties nor do I care much about prestige; but someone pointed out that it could be a decent way of getting a sense for how well a school sets you up for success in the event that either of those things are a priority, which in turn could be an indicator of the school's curriculum quality / career advising support / etc. etc. I'm only considering it as one among a host of other factors, but that logic kinda made sense to me.

 

[WedgeDawg]

Don't put too much weight on either of them. Location, fit, price, and gestalt are all far more important. If you're aiming for a competitive specialty, make sure the school has a track record of matching people into that specialty (doesn't really matter where too much) and that they have a home department. Otherwise, not too much useful information you can glean. Don't look at PD rankings really at all.

 

[longhaul3]

PD ranking is a bad way to compare schools. Use it to look up an individual school and confirm that it is considered a "good" school. Or you may find that a school you didn't know about actually turns out to be a well respected med school (some schools like Pitt punch above the weight of their overall university reputation, some new schools like Hofstra seem to be well respected), or that a big-name university actually has a so-so med school (which is the case for some Ivy League schools). But there's no sense in comparing between schools, especially because all of that is aggregated across departments, while reputation of your school's department in your chosen specialty is more impactful when it comes to the match.

Use the match lists to get a sense of whether people graduating from that school are ending up on paths that you could see for yourself. I think this is a very valuable exercise despite so many people on here dismissing match lists out of hand ("tea leaves" comes to mind). If you may be interested in neurosurgery, and nobody from that school has matched in neurosurgery in 5 years, you should think twice. But it is hard to read into match lists much more than that. I don't think it's fruitful or wise to try to compare them between schools to measure "quality" of med school—there are plenty of other metrics that would give you the same idea.

Also, no matter what, if you're highly interested in a niche specialty, choose a school that has a home department in that specialty (assuming you have a choice). You may not end up in that specialty, but not having a home department is a huge anchor on a residency application.

 

[openstage]

TheDataKing - thoughts?

 

[ginsengreset]

An important factor is the quality/reputation of a medical school's home residency program in that specialty (or rather, the attendings in that program who can vouch for you). It can be generally correlated with medical school rank, but oftentimes they don't (some extreme examples that come to mind is Jefferson and ophthalmology, or Iowa and orthopedics).

Another thing is that in residency selection, the important question is, "will they make a good resident." If MGH's IM program director finds that residents who graduated from Buffalo tend to be exceptional year after year, then people from Buffalo might have an easier time matching at MGH IM in the future.

Conversely, if you see an MS4 match to JHU neurosurgery at you school, and hope to match to the same exact program, your chances might decrease significantly if that MS4 turns out to be one of the worst residents they ever had, even more so if that's the second bad resident JHU neurosurg has had from your school.

 

[aldol16]

I haven't seen the PD ranking methodology but that's bound to be highly inaccurate for one reason - it cannot account for specialty-specific nuances that are actually quite large nuances. Each specialty has "top" programs and those programs are not the same across specialties. And a lot of the selection has to do with who you know and who you know depends in large part on where you come from. So you might think that Thomas Jefferson isn't so impressive from a PD ranking that consists (as it must) of only a small minority of opthalmologists but their match list might place 70% of their students in opthalmology at Wills.

So if you're looking at one or the other, I would look at the match list with the caveat that you should be doing it really only for your specialty of choice. It's hard to generalize when you don't understand the nuances of each field so stick with the one you know. And look at that because the caliber of schools that the students from your school end up matching at will be likely the places you're likely to match at as well.

 

[mightychondria713]

Is there a definitive list of residency programs ranked by specialty? If so, could someone provide the link?

 

[longhaul3]

Is there a definitive list of residency programs ranked by specialty? If so, could someone provide the link?

No. People will point you to Doximity, which is the best there is, but it's garbage.

You can generally assume that most residency programs associated with a top 10-ish med school are very strong programs, especially in the larger specialties (except peds). In the smaller specialties it is much less obvious.

 

[Talldoctor96]

TheDataKing - thoughts?

@TheDataKing You have to tag them lol

 

[obscurecomplimenter]

Is there a definitive list of residency programs ranked by specialty? If so, could someone provide the link?

Been looking for this too.

No. People will point you to Doximity, which is the best there is, but it's garbage.

You can generally assume that most residency programs associated with a top 10-ish med school are very strong programs, especially in the larger specialties (except peds). In the smaller specialties it is much less obvious.

Do you place any weight on the USN&WR rankings?

 

[WedgeDawg]

Do you place any weight on the USN&WR rankings?

For residency? Doximity is the "USNWR" rankings for residency, but is highly flawed at best. If you're looking at the hospital USNWR rankings those are worse than useless for residency. Best you'll get is "expert consensus" from people who are familiar with the field, and in some fields its more nuanced than having a definitive ranking because certain programs are strong in one thing vs another, and it really depends what the applicant is looking for.

For example, in my specialty, I could probably give someone a list of 20-25 programs that I would consider "the best", but beyond that it would be difficult to give them a definitive ranking. If you told me what you were looking for, I could point you in one direction or another, and there are a few programs that historically stand out as always strong at almost everything, but if you took #4 vs #16 vs #23 on that list and asked 5 in the know people in my field to rank them, you'd probably get 5 totally different answers.

 

[mightychondria713]

Is there a way to access Doximity if you are not a current student or physician?

 

[Talldoctor96]

Is there a way to access Doximity if you are not a current student or physician?

Yes you pay but doximity is suss.

 

[Biscuitboy11]

Is there a definitive list of residency programs ranked by specialty? If so, could someone provide the link?

Given that there is no “list” out there, I might suggest, if one had the time,

-first do the reverse of the match list- where/what schools do the residents come from? In general the best programs will get the best students from the best schools. Details/fairness rehashed elsewhere.

-find the major journals in a specialty and look at who is on the editorial board. Do the same with authors and contributors of the major textbooks in a field (if there still are such things).

-ask around in a forum like this that is specialty specific. Thirty years ago as a resident/young attending I could tell you that in anesthesiology the top programs were (in no particular order, off the top of my head) MGH, Brigham and Women’s, Hopkins, UCSF, Duke, Indiana, Gainesville, Columbia, U Washington, Wisconsin, UCSD, Stanford, Emory? This was just my gestalt at the time using the criteria above. Most are to be expected, but a bunch of outliers. Interestingly my medical school was probably a top twenty school at the time, but my department of interest (anesthesiology) was in disarray and was dominated by a very strong surgery department; should have been great but wasn’t. Much stronger now, these things are fluid.

As a premed the utility of all this is pretty low. Unfortunately the reality is for most, the school picks you, you don’t get much choice. Also, most prospective “pediatric neurosurgeons” are drawn to other specialties by interest/practicality/mentoring, which is a good thing.

 

[TheDataKing]

 

[openstage]

Another great resource! Can you explain a little bit about the categories. PD research, PD Primary and percentile. How are these numbers arrived at? Does being unranked have a statistical bearing on this table? Thanks!

 

[aldol16]

Is there a definitive list of residency programs ranked by specialty? If so, could someone provide the link?

Been looking for this too.

Unlike the poster above, I actually like the Doximity rankings. Obviously with any ranking you have to understand the methodology in order to get any benefit from it but I think the programs in the top spots are pretty accurate. With small, competitive specialties, the closest you'll get to a list is to ask someone in the field who is well established which programs are the best reputed. In those specialties, everybody knows everybody and they know which programs end up putting out the best docs, i.e. the docs that people want to hire for fellowship and beyond, which is the ultimate goal anyway.

 

[TheDataKing]

Another great resource! Can you explain a little bit about the categories. PD research, PD Primary and percentile. How are these numbers arrived at? Does being unranked have a statistical bearing on this table? Thanks!

PD ranking is out of 10 for both research and primary (research driven specialty PDs surveyed for research & primary care driven specialty PDs surveyed for primary). I averaged research and primary care rankings. If you scroll to the right, you can see that the distribution of PD scores is close to normally distributed on the graph, so from that percentiles were assigned. Unranked has no statistical bearing on the table - it just means they are unranked on USNWR. It should be noted that the PD response rate to the survey is less than ideal though, so like everything, take it with a grain of salt.

 

[longhaul3]

Do you place any weight on the USN&WR rankings?

No, and especially not for residency programs.

For residency? Doximity is the "USNWR" rankings for residency, but is highly flawed at best. If you're looking at the hospital USNWR rankings those are worse than useless for residency. Best you'll get is "expert consensus" from people who are familiar with the field, and in some fields its more nuanced than having a definitive ranking because certain programs are strong in one thing vs another, and it really depends what the applicant is looking for.

For example, in my specialty, I could probably give someone a list of 20-25 programs that I would consider "the best", but beyond that it would be difficult to give them a definitive ranking. If you told me what you were looking for, I could point you in one direction or another, and there are a few programs that historically stand out as always strong at almost everything, but if you took #4 vs #16 vs #23 on that list and asked 5 in the know people in my field to rank them, you'd probably get 5 totally different answers.

Hit the nail on the head here. I would have been miserable at most of the Doximity top 5 programs in my specialty because they're highly academic. Instead I prioritized our specialty's best operative programs and never looked back. This is a big advantage to having a strong home department—when I was a 4th year, my attendings and residents taught me this idea and recommended where (and where not to, including several "top" programs) apply. Everyone in my specialty is familiar with this concept, and knows which programs are best in which categories, but there's no way to glean that from Doximity.

 

[lenanel]

PD ranking is out of 10 for both research and primary (research driven specialty PDs surveyed for research & primary care driven specialty PDs surveyed for primary). I averaged research and primary care rankings. If you scroll to the right, you can see that the distribution of PD scores is close to normally distributed on the graph, so from that percentiles were assigned. Unranked has no statistical bearing on the table - it just means they are unranked on USNWR. It should be noted that the PD response rate to the survey is less than ideal though, so like everything, take it with a grain of salt.

@TheDataKing could you please give a few examples of research-driven specialties vs. primary care driven specialties?

 

[Rheopecty]

@TheDataKing could you please give a few examples of research-driven specialties vs. primary care driven specialties?

Primary Care: Family Medicine, Psych, Pediatrics, general IM
Research-Driven: Ophtho, Anesthes (Gas), IM fellowships (Cardio, GI, Nephro, etc)

 

[lenanel]

Primary Care: Family Medicine, Psych, Pediatrics, general IM
Research-Driven: Ophtho, Anesthes (Gas), IM fellowships (Cardio, GI, Nephro, etc)

thank youuu that's very helpful