What is considered ESL?

Started by camng22
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camng22

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7+ Year Member
I'm wondering what classifies a person as "ESL" when applying to medical schools. For example, there could be student A who learned the English language as his/her second language at age 4 but speaks the language perfectly fine and student B who learned English as his/her 2nd language at age 18 and just moved to the US. I'm asking this because I'm curious if both cases have some sort of forgiveness from medical schools for the verbal section on the MCAT. I'm sure student B has more leniency, but I'm more like student A so I'm not sure if I'm even considered legit ESL. Does anyone have some insight on this?
 
I don't see how the admissions would give leniency for ESL students, especially with the competitiveness of the process. ESL students will have to perform as well as their peers to gain their acceptance. The only situation where leniency might be given is when the other sections of MCAT are stellar (i.e. the composite score is still very high but low VR) but even that would be a stretch in very competitive schools.
 
I believe you need to know English to learn medicine and practice medicine in US. ESL students should not be given an advantage.
Coming from a former ESL student...
 
I don't know if it makes any difference for med school. If you want formal definition, go to check famous universities' TOEFL requirement
 
camng22 said:
I'm wondering what classifies a person as "ESL" when applying to medical schools. For example, there could be student A who learned the English language as his/her second language at age 4 but speaks the language perfectly fine and student B who learned English as his/her 2nd language at age 18 and just moved to the US. I'm asking this because I'm curious if both cases have some sort of forgiveness from medical schools for the verbal section on the MCAT. I'm sure student B has more leniency, but I'm more like student A so I'm not sure if I'm even considered legit ESL. Does anyone have some insight on this?
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This may be just my opinion, but I wouldn't consider Student A to be ESL. Someone who grows up in an English language school system will be naturally immersed in the langauge starting at a very young age. ESL to me implies someone learned/started learning the language at an older age
 
I don't think there iwll be any forgiveness. The mcat is a standardized exam and it assesses everyone that takes it equally.
 
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