Osteopathic Applicant Rating System?

[PA_dud3]

Has anyone ever thought about working on developing some sort of rating system (similar to LizzyM or WARS) for primarily Osteopathic applicants? I think this would be an interesting and useful tool if it could ever be realized, but unlike MD schools, raw data for Osteopathic Applications is not really widely available. Would there be any feasible way of making such a tool? It would have to take into account things similar to the other systems, just catered to DO apps (DO letters of rec, DO shadowing, etc.). Plus it would have the acronyn OARS, which is kinda cool.

Any thoughts or input would be appreciated!

Dd3

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[Seihai]

Has anyone ever thought about working on developing some sort of rating system (similar to LizzyM or WARS) for primarily Osteopathic applicants? I think this would be an interesting and useful tool if it could ever be realized, but unlike MD schools, raw data for Osteopathic Applications is not really widely available. Would there be any feasible way of making such a tool? It would have to take into account things similar to the other systems, just catered to DO apps (DO letters of rec, DO shadowing, etc.). Plus it would have the acronyn OARS, which is kinda cool.

Any thoughts or input would be appreciated!

Dd3

I'd be interested in helping on this kind of project (even though I'm not applying DO). The lack of application support that's more DO-centered has kind of annoyed me, especially when I'm trying to help my friends who are targeting DO schools.

However, the minimal amounts of data would make it hard to find the correlations that were found using WARS.

 

[PA_dud3]

I'd be interested in helping on this kind of project (even though I'm not applying DO). The lack of application support that's more DO-centered has kind of annoyed me, especially when I'm trying to help my friends who are targeting DO schools.

However, the minimal amounts of data would make it hard to find the correlations that were found using WARS.

Would contacting AACOM regarding this project possibly yield any results? Maybe they have some data they could disseminate. They release a summary of each class yearly but it is hard, nigh impossible, to use it to target specific schools, such as with the WARS.

 

[Seihai]

Would contacting AACOM regarding this project possibly yield any results? Maybe they have some data they could disseminate. They release a summary of each class yearly but it is hard, nigh impossible, to use it to target specific schools, such as with the WARS.

I'm not sure how much information/data they'd be willing to release regarding this. The closest thing we have currently to a data dump is ChooseDO (Choose DO Explorer Registration - Choose DO)

Interestingly, this site lets you FILTER by mean GPA and mean MCAT, but it doesn't actually display these statistics. I'm currently working on a script that would use the "filtering" here to try to figure out the mean GPA and MCAT for each school (I've already figured out the network requests they send to get the school list and such). I plan to try to have it done by mid-August or so, so that we are able to actually get all this info in a more concrete form.

 

[Kardio]

I'm not sure how much information/data they'd be willing to release regarding this. The closest thing we have currently to a data dump is ChooseDO (Choose DO Explorer Registration - Choose DO)

Interestingly, this site lets you FILTER by mean GPA and mean MCAT, but it doesn't actually display these statistics. I'm currently working on a script that would use the "filtering" here to try to figure out the mean GPA and MCAT for each school (I've already figured out the network requests they send to get the school list and such). I plan to try to have it done by mid-August or so, so that we are able to actually get all this info in a more concrete form.

This could probably be done in Python pretty quickly. You just change the bolded ranges to specific numbers:
https:// choosedo.org / explorer / ?fwp_media_gpa=3.38%2C3.70&fwp_media_mcat=498.46%2C508.16

For example, the beginning loops would look like:
For beginning GPA Loop: https:// choosedo.org / explorer / ?fwp_media_gpa=3.30%2C3.30&fwp_media_mcat=498.46%2C508.16
For beginning MCAT Loop: https:// choosedo.org / explorer / ?fwp_media_gpa=3.38%2C3.70&fwp_media_mcat=498.00%2C498.00

→Looping 3.30 through 4.00 and again for 498.00 through 509.00.
→Scrape all data from the GPA and MCAT ranges into data structs (e.g., line 1 = GPA of 3.30 + "all page words"; line 2 = GPA of 3.31 + "all page words")
→Search the data struct for specific phrases ("Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine -AZCOM") to pair GPA and MCAT with a school

 

[993444]

I really don't think this would work or be necessary. DO schools tend to be straight shooters and tell you exactly what they want. Some schools are extremely mission heavy. Other schools really care about how 'osteo' heavy your application is. And some schools are very heavy on the MCAT. Almost all DO schools publish their minimums. They know what they want and make it clear.

OTOH, almost every single MD school simply says "we are looking for compassionate and scientifically curious individuals" and leaves it at that. My favorite part about this is how clearly WashU loves high MCAT's but pretends like it doesn't.

 

[Seihai]

This could probably be done in Python pretty quickly. You just change the bolded ranges to specific numbers:
https:// choosedo.org / explorer / ?fwp_media_gpa=3.38%2C3.70&fwp_media_mcat=498.46%2C508.16

For example, the beginning loops would look like:
For beginning GPA Loop: https:// choosedo.org / explorer / ?fwp_media_gpa=3.30%2C3.30&fwp_media_mcat=498.46%2C508.16
For beginning MCAT Loop: https:// choosedo.org / explorer / ?fwp_media_gpa=3.38%2C3.70&fwp_media_mcat=498.00%2C498.00

→Looping 3.30 through 4.00 and again for 498.00 through 509.00.
→Scrape all data from the GPA and MCAT ranges into data structs (e.g., line 1 = GPA of 3.30 + "all page words"; line 2 = GPA of 3.31 + "all page words")
→Search the data struct for specific phrases ("Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine -AZCOM") to pair GPA and MCAT with a school

Yeah, this is basically what I've been writing. I've been implementing a binary search version of it to reduce the number of queries and hopefully make the searching easier.

I say mid-August to give myself some leeway, but I fully expect to have it done by the end of the day today or tomorrow. I just haven't gotten around to it until now, for the most part.

 

[Kardio]

Yeah, this is basically what I've been writing. I've been implementing a binary search version of it to reduce the number of queries and hopefully make the searching easier.

I say mid-August to give myself some leeway, but I fully expect to have it done by the end of the day today or tomorrow. I just haven't gotten around to it until now, for the most part.

I don’t know what you mean by binary - but if it’s easier, you could do data scraping the way I proposed, add a delay between searches (to stop your access from being denied) and run it overnight.

 

[Cornfed101]

I really don't think this would work or be necessary. DO schools tend to be straight shooters and tell you exactly what they want. Some schools are extremely mission heavy. Other schools really care about how 'osteo' heavy your application is. And some schools are very heavy on the MCAT. Almost all DO schools publish their minimums. They know what they want and make it clear.

OTOH, almost every single MD school simply says "we are looking for compassionate and scientifically curious individuals" and leaves it at that. My favorite part about this is how clearly WashU loves high MCAT's but pretends like it doesn't.

Which DO schools favor high MCAT?

 

[993444]

Which DO schools favor high MCAT?

Touro-CA for sure

 

[Seihai]

Yeah, this is basically what I've been writing. I've been implementing a binary search version of it to reduce the number of queries and hopefully make the searching easier.

I say mid-August to give myself some leeway, but I fully expect to have it done by the end of the day today or tomorrow. I just haven't gotten around to it until now, for the most part.

Finished running the code. I'll post a Google doc with the GPA/MCAT information I scraped either later today or tomorrow.

 

[Seihai]

Finished running the code. I'll post a Google doc with the GPA/MCAT information I scraped either later today or tomorrow.

Finished, made a post on it to easily reference in the future: Mean MCAT and Mean GPAs for all DO Schools (scraped from ChooseDO)

 

[Seihai]

Touro-CA for sure

You're right - from my scraping, Touro-CA has an MCAT mean of around 508-509.

Interestingly, AZCOM has a similar MCAT mean of around 508-509 as well.

 

[DrStephenStrange]

Which DO schools favor high MCAT?

TCOM, Touro-CA, CUSOM, RVU-CO to say the least.

 

[Seihai]

Which DO schools favor high MCAT?

TCOM, Touro-CA, CUSOM, RVU-CO to say the least.

(from the link in my signature)

 

[Smolpuppo21]

Which DO schools favor high MCAT?

Touro-CA, AZCOM, CCOM, DMUCOM

 

[Osminog]

According to the Explorer site, VCOM-Auburn has an average MCAT of 498. I know that VCOM is mission-driven and tends to emphasize applicant GPA... but wow, that's low.

 

[PA_dud3]

According to the Explorer site, VCOM-Auburn has an average MCAT of 498. I know that VCOM is mission-driven and tends to emphasize applicant GPA... but wow, that's low.

Pod school MCATs tend to be crazy low, if you ever look at them

 

[DrStephenStrange]

According to the Explorer site, VCOM-Auburn has an average MCAT of 498. I know that VCOM is mission-driven and tends to emphasize applicant GPA... but wow, that's low.

I don't know about VCOM-Auburn, but I know ARCOM average MCAT is over 500 now, 499 was the average for the inaugural class. Although, I'm very surprised ICOM is averaging 503 for their inaugural class. This goes to show that the applicant pool is still fairly competitive despite all those new schools opening.