What do the percentiles mean in MSAR?

[P0ke]

See now this gets even weirder for me, because if you just want to know how you compare to others, you can just use the lower bound. If a full 10% get a perfect score, report them all as 90th percentile so it is easy to see that 10% of other people out there are just as awesome. When all I see is 95th percentile for that situation, it's not doing a good job whatsoever of communicating how rare a perfect score is.

You can probably find an unintuitive explanation for percentile rank's use by digging through some old statistics books hidden in the basement of a library at MIT or something. I think I'll hang up my coat here though.

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[mwsapphire]

I think that's more because 72.4% of statistics are made up

Is it really 72.4 percent though? Are you sure it's not 71.7-72.7 percent? Upper bound or lower bound

 

[Prometheus123]

I have wondered about this as well. I think the *mean* would be skewed by higher or lower scorers. But I could be misunderstanding your question. The median is just showing the number that shows up in the middle of all of the scores. I thought through this at the beginning of the application cycle and I appreciate using the median because then I know that half of the people have scored at or above the median value and half have scored at or below. If they use average, the number could be skewed from some serious outliers (for example, the lowest MCAT accepted by Duke was 498 and lowest GPA Accepted by Vanderbilt was a 3.1 last year - add that in to the rest of the stats and find the mean and then you have lower numbers that might not be representative of the GPA/MCAT needed to be a successful applicant).

I'm unfortunately below the 10% GPA threshold for most schools, so that does not inspire confidence.

Good response. I'm also below the 10th percentile for most schools. Confidence (about getting in, at least) is overrated. For what it's worth, from the few posts I've seen on here of yours, you seem like an intelligent, thoughtful, and compassionate person who explains things well. So that should count for something in interviews.

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

Isn't that the exclusive way of using percentile though? Whereas inclusive would allow for 100th percentile scores. I think you guys are arguing past each other about this, most of the time percentiles are used exclusively but the AAMC for whatever reason uses them inclusively.

They arbitrarily define their span to be 1-100. That's fine, but that's just how they label it. So instead of going 0-99, they go 1-100. To me that doesn't make any sense given what a percentile is.

 

[mwsapphire]

Good response. I'm also below the 10th percentile for most schools. Confidence (about getting in, at least) is overrated. For what it's worth, from the few posts I've seen on here of yours, you seem like an intelligent, thoughtful, and compassionate person who explains things well. So that should count for something in interviews.

But you guys both have UW trends and kickass MCAT scores.
Remember , SDN is the most conservative measure for things. For the most part, take what's said on here as the worst-case scenario.

 

[Prometheus123]

But you guys both have UW trends and kickass MCAT scores.
Remember , SDN is the most conservative measure for things. For the most part, take what's said on here as the worst-case scenario.

You're right, and thanks for saying that. SDN certainly offers some exceptional lessons in planning for the worst, and preparing optimally. I just wish I had found this place sooner. It's good that you're learning all this early.

 

[7331poas]

My god. There are doctors out there that can't interpret a box and wisker plot.

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