What's the official word on out -of-order quarters...

[TwoSteveSquared]

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For those of you on the quarter system, I'm sure you'll realize that the program doesn't automatically change the academic year according to the calender year. Same for summer sessions.

That means, if you follow instructions, all winter and summer quarters will be mislabled.

Previous posts have said to leave it alone and to fix it.

Specialists have also said both to leave it alone and to fix it.

Well, I would like to mail out my app to some schools, and don't like the idea of mailing out a scambled course load. Anyone heard recently on how AMCAS wants us to deal with the problem?

 

[TwoSteveSquared]

Oh, in case it wasn't clear, I'm talking about entering course work on the AMCAS

 

[SMW]

I don't know how AMCAS wants us to deal with the problem, but I know how I dealt with it.
I just listed all my classes chronologically for each school year, using the option that lets you organize by school year, rather than by quarter or semester. Worked like a charm!

 

[Milhouse Van Houten]

hey,
oddly it was my SPRING quarter that was messed up. everything else was fine, including the summers. if i input spring 1999, it showed up as spring 1998. so the order is really confusing on my application. my third quarter at school, spring 98, shows up as spring 97-when i was still in high school. i personally believe this is what is holding back some of the apps who applied earlier and are wondering why others are getting processed before theirs. who knows, though. BY THE WAY, with every paper copy of my AMCAS app that i sent in, i included a two sentence note explaining why my quarter order looks so screwed up.

 

[TwoSteveSquared]

I did the explanation thing too, but for the rest, I gonna manually fixed the damn thing, so it looks good. I figure no matter what, AMCAS will correct it when they verify grades, so it doesn't matter how you do it.

I'm sure the med schools think it's funny when they get the notes explaining AMCAS mistakes. 😀

 

[sandflea]

i had the same problem and i just made sure i entered everything correctly. so basically i submitted my app with everything looking 'wrong' but entered correctly. you still label each term 'freshman, sophomore', etc, so people will be able to piece it together. and i am just enclosing a note with my secondaries explaining that i know my winter quarters are out of order and that i'm not a *****--it was a problem with AMCAS. the problem is pretty minor compared to those other people are having, so i still wouldn't waste any time submitting your app.

petros, you raise a really good point. i submitted early (june 24th, the first day i could submit based on my last name) and i'm wondering why my app hasn't been processed yet. maybe it is actually because of the mismatched order of my quarters?!

 

[SMW]

Has anyone considered that perhaps the app was configured so that you were supposed to input the academic year so that a course you took in the spring of '99 should have been inputted as spring '98 (since it was the '98-'99 academic year)? Wouldn't this explain why some people's winter quarters and some people's spring quarters are messed up? Although logically if the winter quarter was messed up, spring should have been too.

 

[sandflea]

no, actually this is what you're NOT supposed to do. the app is configured to *automatically* change the entered calendar year to the academic year...so a course that you took in spring quarter/semester of 1999 would be entered 'spring 1999', and the app is supposed to automatically convert this to read 'spring 98' since it was the academic year that started in 1998. the point is, you're supposed to enter the term in the actual calendar year it took place, and the app is supposed to do the rest. why the app was configured to do this, i don't know, because it's caused an unbelievable amount of confusion.

 

[kutastha]

Well, what I've noticed is that sandflea did it so it corresponded to his transcripts so it looks wrong on the app, but the dating is right. I did it according to what it looked like on the AMCAS screen. He submitted his on the 23rd of June (?) and I did on the 26th. And yet neither of us has had our transcripts verified. Whether or not one or both of us did it wrong, we were both on the quarter system, yet those that were on semester and submitted as late as July 3rd are already verified and sent off.

Andrew