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That would make sense, the 2004 MSAR would be a common edition someone in 2005 or 2006 would be working with, right? So I bet SUNY just posted slightly old data from the 2004 MSAR
TIL one decade ago, average MCATs at top medical schools were ~32-34
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28/39 (72%) moved their 10th percentile to or above their 2006 MCAT average.
Qualitatively, there seems to be a strong public vs. private split, with public schools having 10th percentiles at or below their 2006 MCAT averages.
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I imagine it would be a lot harder for public to make that kind of shift when they want to pull largely from their smaller instate crowd.
That's an outrageous number imo. About three quarters of schools have moved their bottom 10% mark up to (or beyond) where their average was in under a decade. Crazy.
It totally is in line with your selectivity graph.
Its not that competition is rapidly increasing. As Gonnif points out, competition has dipped marginally. Medical schools, for some reason, have been aggressively increasing acceptee stats.
Its not that competition is rapidly increasing. As Gonnif points out, competition has dipped marginally. Medical schools, for some reason, have been aggressively increasing acceptee stats.
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I mean, this shows a rise of just over 1 pt in about a decade. That degree of creep doesn't even touch the behavior of top schools. For some reason the couple dozen currently at the top collectively decided to drive their stats waaaay up, very fast, in the same period.It totally is in line with your selectivity graph.
Its not that competition is rapidly increasing. As Gonnif points out, competition has dipped marginally. Medical schools, for some reason, have been aggressively increasing acceptee stats.
So if we accept this behavior definitely happened...why? And have schools resisting the trend (e.g. U of Washington, UCLA) suffered at all from not behaving like their peers?
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It totally is in line with your selectivity graph.
Its not that competition is rapidly increasing. As Gonnif points out, competition has dipped marginally. Medical schools, for some reason, have been aggressively increasing acceptee stats.
Yes, what is interesting is that the overall average for LM scores has no changed all that much over the course of the decade, but the change in LM matriculant distributions at a handful of schools has been insane.
I don't think schools have really suffered in any meaningful way...I suspect there was a very big push from the top (Deans of Admissions and up) to push USNWR ranking as high as possible. In order to do that, you basically have to do two things, assuming the actual quality of your school is not changing over a short period of time: 1) push your selectivity metrics as high as possible (get more and more people to apply, only accept people with the highest scores), and 2) have a lot of research $$$.
2 happens at an institutional level, but 1 happens at the admissions level. For schools like UCLA, UCSF that have not changed their stats very much over the course of the decade but stay at the top of the rankings, you have a situation where their average numbers were already near the top of the pack a decade ago and they just havent followed the arms race as aggressively, likely because they are already such well established institutions that their research $$$ alone could sustain their "high rank" status. U Wash is a bit more unique in that there is heavy in-state bias at that school so there can only be so many Washingtonians, but beyond that it is extremely well regarded as a research institution and has a lot of research $$$, hence they can keep their #8 spot in the research rankings without resorting to WashU level number whoring.
This explanations works when you consider how quickly Vanderbilt and NYU have risen in the rankings at both the undergrad and medical school level pursuing this same type of strategy while the institution itself remains practically identical. Certainly, it has resulted in a boost in prestige from ranking alone, even if, as @efle has demonstrated elsewhere, their medical school graduates are still not has highly regarded by residency PDs as graduates of places like Baylor and Mayo which have spent a long time in the "tier" of rankings Vandy and NYU now occupy.
But there's a problem with this explanation. Namely, why the hell would schools like WashU, Penn, Columbia, etc follow suit in this arms race? Their research $$$, renown, and attachment to brand-name undergrads should be enough to sustain their rankings and their prestige (i.e. make them attractive places for donor $$ and good applicants to apply to). While Harvard has not shifted their stats upward by as an incredible amount as others, even if they had a matriculant average LizzyM of 1, their research endowment is so incredibly obscene, their associated hospitals so wealthy that they would still be number 1 in USNWR even if HMS itself were only a collection of boxes and duct tape with lectures entirely written in Braille. They have no skin in this numbers arms race.
From earlier discussion and evidence ITT, it is obvious this process is admissions and not applicant driven. So, we should take a look at those schools in particular more closely.
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Remember that the distribution is fitted to the raw data and scaled accordingly to always appear to be stable. What we can't see, and only the AAMC knows, is that what may have required only 60/100 right answers to get a 32 now requires 90/100 answers to get. I suspect that the extreme upper end of the section scores may be separated by as little as one question or even a fraction of a question (statistically speaking).
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I can confirm it for you, the old AAMC Practice Exams had answer key tables that would convert your raw correct to scaled, and it was almost always 1 or 2 questions wrong to drop 15 -> 14 -> 13. Whereas in the middle of the distribution it would be a few questions per point.
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MCAT alone is creeping along slowly, see middle of this post
Looking at NIH total awards from 2001-2014 (http://www.brimr.org/NIH_Awards/2015/NIH_Awards_2015.htm see table 11) yields some interesting insights. Schools with the most increased MCAT averages seem to be from either the top or bottom 20% in terms of rank change.
For example, Northwestern is in the top 10% for change over the 13 year time span, moving from rank ~40 to ~15. This seems to indicate there has been a concerted effort on all fronts (NIH funding + applicant stats) to raise their USNWR ranking.
@Lucca I think you may be slightly mistaken. WashU, Columbia, and others don't seem to have raised their MCAT as aggressively as others. The only exception to this is U Penn.
For example, Northwestern is in the top 10% for change over the 13 year time span, moving from rank ~40 to ~15. This seems to indicate there has been a concerted effort on all fronts (NIH funding + applicant stats) to raise their USNWR ranking.
@Lucca I think you may be slightly mistaken. WashU, Columbia, and others don't seem to have raised their MCAT as aggressively as others. The only exception to this is U Penn.
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Well, WashU started a lot closer to the 38 mark, and didn't columbia go up from like 31.5 -> 36?
Moving up a bunch from a starting position of 28-29 is going to be easier than the motion up mid-30s.
Moving up a bunch from a starting position of 28-29 is going to be easier than the motion up mid-30s.
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To be fair, Vanderbilt med has been hovering around the top 15 for quite some time.
Also, NYU med's recent spike was largely due to the influx of funds it received for Hurricane Sandy relief.
Your point about WashU, Penn, and Columbia, etc inexplicably joining the arms race still stands though.
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I forgot about the hurricane Sandy money.
Damn... I’m not in medicine anymore but it’s gotten very competitive in the past ten years. I remember being overwhelmed by the competition when I applied.... I had a rough cycle and had good things except for MCAT (28). Everything else though was competitive though for me and may have had bette luck then. I also probably needed a redo on MCAT... decided not to though.
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Every physician has said they would never be able to get in todays climate
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This is a comment usually made to suggest they would not get in today if they applied with the same statistics and EC's a generation ago. This isn't a fair comparison. Who's to say current physicians placed in the same pre-medical environment (as an undergrad) would not get into medical school? I find it hard to fathom the current matriculants are any more talented than those of past generations. While the pressures of the current process almost forces pre-meds to do hundreds of hours of ECs, don't tell me every pre-med is going to be doing 500 hours of research/community service during an era when there was no need to. Current physicians would do just fine.
I think what was implied by their comments was that med schools expect/require much more from applicants.
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I know it's been mentioned that the advent of the internet has been a factor in this. What about medical school rankings? When did US news start ranking medical schools and when did those rankings become easily accessible? Was there less of an emphasis on going to top medical schools from applicants? I'm not saying there wasn't an emphasis (I don't know the climate). Just curious if a shift in thinking caused the top scorers to apply heavily to "top" schools.
Yeah one reason I stuck it out was my doc told me I was a shoe in with 3.7 lol... far from it though. I ended up switching paths and don’t regret it. I think medicine in this country is facing a lot of uncertainty and not sure if dealing with tuition, etc is worth it. Plus I wanted to enjoy life and not have residency etc... have some job interviews for engineering that look good so I’m excited. I remember when I was 19 or 20 and he told me that with my grades I was fine... had no idea it was that competitive and would have changed out knowing what I know now.
