No one was left unmatched. I go to NEOUCOM, and I highly doubt that anyone here has heard of it, yet it doesn't seem to stop anyone.
I have. Where I did my residency gets a lot of NEOUCOM people going through, either as applicants or as residents (and one of the current retina fellows at Doheny is from there).
I agree with JR that there are many factors to consider when one chooses a med school, and it's not a good idea to assume that just because someone is at a mid-tier school that they are an inferior student.
That sort of arrogance can really get people burned. We've had a few applicants come through in past years from "top" medical schools who clearly felt that our program was beneath them, but they came to interview as a safety (one applicant even flat out told us we were one of his safeties). That's a quick way to get yourself knocked down the list, and a few of them have ended up not matching at all.
IME, medical school ranking may be a tie-breaker, but it's definitely not a make-or-break issue. Of course, when you have so many closely clustered applicants, that little tie-breaker can become significant, especially at the top programs.
Board scores mean significantly more. Honors mean more
if you're being compared to others from your school. As mentioned above, honors criteria vary widely from school to school. The only time they're really helpful is if you have a few students from one school, and some of them get honors, and others don't.
As someone mentioned above (I don't remember who), who writes your LOR's mentions. Most people skip to the name on the letterhead first, and then skim the actual letter. If I know the person writing the letter, that means more. If I know them well, I'll sometimes call them and get the real scoop. We get some people where the LOR is clearly a form, because we'll get multiple letters from the same attending, and they are word-for-word identical. That doesn't inspire confidence in the effort put into the letters, or how much we can get out of them. This is one area where the big-name med schools give an advantage over the mid-tier schools. They'll have more recognizable names. That just means that if you're at a mid-tier, you have to work harder somewhere else on the app to make up for it.
I think the biggest problem with my medical school was that they don't have a true ophthalmology department, just some ophthalmologists affiliated with the hospital. I got lucky when I was there, because a relatively big-name glaucoma guy was the dean of the medschool for the 4 years I was a student. That helped, and I made it to one of my top choices despite being from a mid-tier med school.
Dave