Unethical Behavior of Programs during the interview trail...

[Whiteman]

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Can anyone comment any bad experiences they had during the interview or post-interview. I heard that in some places they asked whether a person was single or married. Also, I heard stories that the reason some program went into the scramble is because they didn't rank like 30-40% of the applicants interviewed. Did anyone else have any other shocking experiences 😱

Please comment

 

[Sohalia]

Can anyone comment any bad experiences they had during the interview or post-interview. I heard that in some places they asked whether a person was single or married. Also, I heard stories that the reason some program went into the scramble is because they didn't rank like 30-40% of the applicants interviewed. Did anyone else have any other shocking experiences 😱

Please comment

Well I don't know about this not ranking 30-40% of interviewees comment. I think it would be *a lot less likely* to find high quality PM&R applicants through the scramble. Different programs interview different numbers of applicants and each program knows how many applicants it generally has to rank to fill. I recall hearing the RIC interviewed about 200 this year. They have 12 spots. I believe Mayo said they interviewed about 45, rank them all, and go to about 20 on their list. I think they have 6 or 8 spots.

 

[Atlantic]

Yep. I had some illegal questions on the interview trail including, but not limited to: are you married, do you have a boyfriend, what's your ethnicity, etc. It's my understanding that interviewers are "not allowed" to ask these questions unless you volunteer the information. Personally, I don't think its a big deal and I wasn't about to respond with, "Excuse me, but that's an illegal question."

As far as ranking, I don't think it's all that uncommon for programs to not rank all their interviewees. This seemed like common practice in medicine during my prelim interviews. One PM&R program even showed us their interviewer evals and one of the options was "Do not rank".