@efle once said something to the effect that SDN (the amorphous hive mind which together generates the “culture” and various “trends” of thought on the site, not individuals per se or even the majority of users) is concerned about getting into a top X medical school, not just medical school in general. It’s known that brand-name UGs are overrepresented on SDN compared to the premed pop in general, as well as ppl with very high test scores and GPAs. As a result, a lot of people never seriously doubted that they could get into medical school. These same people also tend to be more vocal on the site about their own accomplishments, for obvious reasons. All of this coupled to the neuroticism of the UG years lends to an environment where it’s easy to feel that the broad user base is disconnected for reality, where, as you can see, most people don’t *literally* think numbers are everything.
I for one think of this as a numbers driven process, but not a process that is wholly dependent solely on numbers.
The way I like to think of the top school/“choosing ppl for med school rather than clinical practice” thing is that some schools want to educate “Doctors Plus” as in Doctors plus something else (I think I’ve heard this exact phrasing used by a Dell Med adcom, and heard it repeated again by a friend at Stanford med). What that something else might be and how well you can show that A) you are capable of achieving it, B) it makes sense to combine with medicine, and C) your ambitions fit with the school’s goals is an open question. Everyone I know who is at a “top institution” fits this mold pretty clearly, at least on paper; in reality, they might just be yet another LA suburb bound dermatologist in training. The less you fit this mold — that is, practically everyone since almost nobody who pursues an MD is seriously considering much beyond lifestyle and interest in a field — the stronger your stats probably have to be to get anyone’s attention. This is all speculation on my part from what I’ve seen, I’ve no way of proving this.
I think it’s sillly for adcoms to complain about this mentality in their applicants, though. They are the ones that created this game, were just playing it. I know too many people who would’ve made far better physicians than me who won’t get to go to medical school because their grades and/or test scores couldn’t impress (even though they would’ve been far beyond the numbers predicted to actually succeed in medical school and pass licensing exams).
