Why do we have to enter the same info on secondaries?

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A lot of times the questions on the secondaries are remnants of the old system, where there wasn't an extensive primary application - schools had to ask their own questions. As to why they don't take those questions away, I don't know. I can speculate that enough applicants put something slightly new in the secondary that it is worth it to the adcoms to keep the sections. For example, I used a secondary to mention a part of my profile I didn't think about during my primary filling out process.

In general, we all have to get used to a bit of redundancy - it's part of the profession 🙂 Anyhow, the essays take way more time to write, so for me it hasn't been that much of a burden to fill out the applications. Maybe you got unlucky with applying to schools that all have massive secondaries?
 
They want to put on a show before they take your money.
 
25% of the secondaries I filled out required my to re-input all of my activities. A couple others required me to manually retype all of my prerequisite course information. I think it's mostly just a matter of laziness, funding, and tech savviness. It's not hard to write a software program that does everything I did except pay the fee and write an essay, it just takes a little money and time. Some schools might purposely leave this stuff to decrease the number of completed applications they have to wade through. If they know they can get an excellent class out of 2000 applicants, why not try to limit it to that?

Consider this your first scut work assignment.
 
25% of the secondaries I filled out required my to re-input all of my activities.

A couple others required me to manually retype all of my prerequisite course information.
A given adcomm committee person will not necessarily have access to your entire application when they are asked to assess an application for certain parameters.

Some programs calculate a prerequiste GPA, as well as considering the AMCAS generated BCPM GPA and cGPA. This would also gives the capability of omitting a particularly bad semester and doing a recalculation that will benefit the applicant.
 
What's ironic is that they ask us redundant questions and make us enter the same stuff like course work and activities, but when it comes to the "additional info" section, they suddenly want us to share something "not found elsewhere on our application".
 
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