What proportion of applications that a school receives have competitive stats?

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LuluLovesMe

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We all know that the typical med school gets 100+ applicants for every seat that they have to fill, but I'm wondering how many people I am actually competing against.

How many of those 100 applicants have stats that give them no chance to even be offered an interview?

If I am truly competing against 100+ applicants for maybe 2-3 interview positions, that really seems like a long shot.
 
It has been said before that ~50% of applicants can be cut from the pool after glancing at their app for a couple seconds.

I imagine that number is higher for schools with a famous name (I bet Harvard is around 90%) and lower for those schools that are less-well known (such as Utah).
 
Let's play with some numbers here.

Let's assume that a school gets 5000 applications for 150 spots (probably fairly close to standard). Let's also assume that this school will admit 2x the number of students that they have seats (again, probably fairly standard). This means that this school will be looking at 5000 applicants for 300 spots. Thats a 16.6:1 ratio already. Of these, probably 50% or so (the number being thrown around) probably aren't competitive at all. This reduces it to 2500:300, which is 8.3:1 ratio. Let's say that the school accepts 50% of their applicants post interview (again, pretty standard), so there are 600 interviews given, making your chances of an interview 2500:600, or around 4.2:1. So you have nearly a 25% chance of an interview at any given average school.

Obviously this makes a lot of assumptions, and changes greatly as the parameters change, but I think it demonstrates that it's not nearly the 100:1 odds you're suggesting.
 
It has been said before that ~50% of applicants can be cut from the pool after glancing at their app for a couple seconds.

I imagine that number is higher for schools with a famous name (I bet Harvard is around 90%) and lower for those schools that are less-well known (such as Utah).
Utah is a bit of an oddball. Most seats are basically guaranteed to IS applicants, and a few to Idaho. I believe it's in the ballpark of ~3 OOS applicants get admitted, per year. If there's a plentiful amount of OOS, the competition can be astronomical.
 
This table below can give you a solid outline.

https://www.aamc.org/download/321508/data/factstable24.pdf

Out of 140,000 applications, if you want to define the cut off for competitive as having a 3.4+ and a 30+ that includes 60,000 people. So right off the bat, about 55-60% of people who apply have stats lower than that. The acceptance rate for those with stats lower than that will be low; think somewhere a bit under 20%. Number goes up to 75k if you include people from the 3.6-4.0 and 27-29 group.

But it's not unreasonable to assume that at an average school, given these stats that at least half of applicants are going to have stats that make it a long shot to apply on average. Keep in mind, even a 30-32 and 3.4-3.59 might not be all that competitive or a 3.7/28 might not be competitive.

There are other factors to consider as well. This table does a fair job highlighting the level of cluelessness of many applicants when you see schools like Robert Woods or FSU get the majority of applicants OOS when only 2% of their class is OOS. That only adds more people who aren't really competitive applying; people with fair stats will apply to schools with really strong IS bias or schools who's mission doesn't fit them.
https://www.aamc.org/download/321442/data/factstable1.pdf

And then on top of that you have to consider the applicants who have clear flaws in their app. Limited clinical exposure. Minimal volunteering is another big one. Some other ones such as blatantly poor secondary essays or lukewarm LORs are other variables to consider. All these variables keep adding up be it poor stats, to applicants with decent stats applying to schools that don't fit them, to having flawed EC's or other factors to the point you will get a large number of applicants at a particular school who probably are well below the average matriculant at that school. How much of the applicant pool is that? I don't know. But at a given school it wouldn't surprise me if something like 2/3 applicants at least really had no business applying there if I were to make a wild guess based off what I said.

If you talk about top schools, about 5,000 applicants a year either have a 3.8+/33+, 3.6+/36+, or 3.4+/39+. Those tend to be the type of stats that are competitive for those schools. And obviously you can be assured very few with those stats apply to all top 20's or maybe even half the top 20's. Remember the average applicant only applies to 13-14 schools. So if you want to make the big assumption these type of people on average apply to 6-7 top 20 schools well a given top 20 school is probably only going to have 1500 applications like that a cycle. IF the average top 20 school gets 6000 apps a year, that means really only about 1/4 has those type of stats that make them truly qualified. Obvoiusly there will be some who can be competitive without those stats such as URMs, but that at least gives you a ball park estimate.
 
Based upon what my wily old Admission dean has told me (and which has been somewhat confirmed by other Adcom members on SDN), I'd say about 50% of the apps are from people who have no business being in the same city as a med school, much less attending one.

The wise gyngyn has reported having to recieve an app of someone who had a single digit MCAT score. Not merely in on one subsection; but for the entire exam!!!

We all know that the typical med school gets 100+ applicants for every seat that they have to fill, but I'm wondering how many people I am actually competing against.

How many of those 100 applicants have stats that give them no chance to even be offered an interview?

If I am truly competing against 100+ applicants for maybe 2-3 interview positions, that really seems like a long shot.
 
Based upon what my wily old Admission dean has told me (and which has been somewhat confirmed by other Adcom members on SDN), I'd say about 50% of the apps are from people who have no business being in the same city as a med school, much less attending one.

The wise gyngyn has reported having to recieve an app of someone who had a single digit MCAT score. Not merely in on one subsection; but for the entire exam!!!

I really want to know how that person got a one digit MCAT score and why they decided to apply with it. Even by random guessing shouldn't you end up with double digits?
 
I really want to know how that person got a one digit MCAT score and why they decided to apply with it. Even by random guessing shouldn't you end up with double digits?

Random guessing should lead to a 3-4 in each section resulting in a total of 9-12. Submitting an empty section should lead to a 1 each, resulting in a total of 3. So a 3-9 is a combination of random guessing and submitting an incomplete section.
 
I really want to know how that person got a one digit MCAT score and why they decided to apply with it. Even by random guessing shouldn't you end up with double digits?

Maybe they thought the highest score possible was 10? A 9 wouldn't seem so bad then...
 
Honestly, it sounds like that person was pressured into applying to med school by family or something. I don't think anyone could accidentally fail that terribly.
 
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