You want concrete evidence, so I'll give it to you. The average applicant had a 19.6 DAT and 3.5 GPA. That means anyone applying with a 20 DAT and 3.5 GPA will be at the baseline average among the other 3,000 applicants trying to get their foot in the door. 20AA is a great DAT score, but you are missing the point in that so many predentals now have 20AA on the DAT that it cannot make you a competitive applicant at Case Western anymore unless you have a 3.6 or higher GPA to stand out among the other thousands. Whether you like it or not, 21AA is the new standard at getting your foot in the door at schools like Case that receive thousands of applications every cycle. It stinks to be required to score that high, I know, but that's just the nature of the situation right now.
You mentioned my earlier post about 16AA in 1990 being the prime time of applying to dental school with only a little over 5000 applicants. I think you answered your own question if you sit back and think about it. Not only were there far fewer applicants to each school, but the DAT numbers were lower as well. It was the perfect situation if you were getting into dentistry around that time. That was 17 years ago, though. The biggest factor in admissions these days has been the influx of applicants with similar scores as everybody else, not necessarily higher scores. If Case Western only had 1,000 applicants for 76 spots, you could take that 20AA and feel relatively safe but it's three times a thousand now. A 20AA DAT doesn't stand a chance against those numbers without something else shining on the application.
Aim for 21AA when applying to Case Western these days for so many reasons. If you can't reach that goal, then there's a darn good chance you will be in the same boat with the other ~2,860 applicants that didn't make it in the door and were accepted elsewhere. Just the way it is these days.
Sorry, but we have a
No Sale these days or any days on your concrete evidence. If you had said that you have a friend who has a friend whose friend knows someone on the adcoms at Case or if you had said that you read it somewhere but cant remember the specific issue of Mad Magazine, your assertions might have merited some consideration. For 2006 there were only 6 schools (Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, Washington, Suny SB, Penn) with a combined first year enrollment of 417 that had mean AA score at 21 and above. The 2960 count for Case
is not convincing evidence considering the fact that some schools such as Columbia with
2050 applicants for
76 slots commanded a mean AA score of 22.16; Washington with 1012 applicants and 90 slots had a mean score of 21.22 and UCLA with 1743 applicants and 88 slots had a mean score of 22.
You seem to be confusing the
applicant pool mean DAT scores with those of
enrollees mean scores. Your assertion that
average Case applicant had a DAT of 19.6 is most certainly an exaggeration, considering the fact that the published number for 05 was 18.73 and for 06 it was 18.98. Is it possible for Case to achieve the high bar you have suggested? Of course it is. However, in order for that to happen, (1) the number of US applicants would have to increase dramatically or (2) applicants with high DAT scores would have to overwhelmingly prefer Case over the other 55 schools.
Acceptance to ds is more a function of the number of applicant than DAT score in those cases (as in 1990) where the applicant-to- enrollee ratio is close to 1. In such a case, the DAT scores of the applicants and enrollees are virtually identical. As the number of applicants increases to ratios of 2 and 3 (and perhaps higher), as is the case in the present, we see a significant shift in the mean DAT of the
enrollees. Contrary to comments by others, the DAT in the applicant pool remains relatively unchanged in spite of the increase in the number of applicants who take the exam. For 2006 out of 8936 applicants who took the DAT less than 10% or ~ 890 had DAT of 21 and above. There just aren't enough students with high DAT scores to go around. Understanding statistics or, if you will, the population distribution (Bell Curve) is critical to understanding the numbers game.
