When program directors complain about too many people with red flags not getting filtered out, is that code for too many applicants with fails?

[LondonVibes]

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This is more shower thought esque, and does not necessarily affect my personal application (which has one step fail, and pending Level 2, no COMLEX fails). But I've heard the PD on a rotation I was on complaining that the filters aren't working. I'm guessing that it has to do with Step fails because the filter can take care of most anything else red flag related.

 

[NotAProgDirector]

The comment is vague, so hard to know what is being referenced. It is true that you can only filter on last step/level performance, so there is no easy way to filter people whom have failed a step in the past but since passed. ERAS also used to show an indicator that there was an "issue" on the USMLE transcript (usually a fail) which is no longer shown, so reviewers need to actually look at the transcript. Which is really annoying, since most of the time there's no additional info there.

But there's lots of other things that can't be filtered upon either. Professionalism issues in medical school. medical school performance in general (i.e. no concept like GPA). Performance in any specific clerkship. There's work being done on trying to use AI to digest the free text info in the MSPE and report on that, but it remains very imperfect IMHO.