I have often thought that the AAMC rules for early decision need major revision. As it is implimented now, the incentives are perverse. For instance, as already has been stated, a decision to apply to any medical school early decision means that your primary application will not be submitted to any other scholl before October. That pushes your secondary back to at least November, and interviews would not be offered or scheduled until some time after that. This is a substantial disadvantage because I think most schools have filled a substantial percentage of their classes by late November. This puts the late applicant at a disadvantage - certainly as large a disadvantage as taking the August MCAT, which almost NOBODY suggests is a good idea.
For the overwhelming majority of applicants, it is more important to attend some medical school rather than a particular medical school. No doubt one would not get far in an interview if she said "If i can't go here, I don't want to go anywhere". But the compounding of disadvantage is most acute here because it is precisely that early applicantion student who was not competive enough to get into his ED school who can least afford to delay his application to any school.
The anticipated response to this is that only "exceedingly qualified" students should apply ED. And in fact most programs that have ED admissions say something to this effect. But this ignores fundamental reality of medical schools admissions, which is that with respect to a PARTICULAR school, one cannot meaningfully predict that she will gain admission with any sort of reliability. This is not to say that admissions in general are not reliable (despite what you read about it being a craps shoot, it is not - people with 3.5 and 30 MCATs WILL by and large get in somewhere) but that one cannot make reliable predictions for a particular school. Hence, no matter how qualified you are, an ED applicant has precious little reason to presume that he will get in. This is a tremendous disincentive to apply ED even for the most able applicants.
The ED application system should be reformed to permit the ED applicant to apply to ALL her schools according to the regular application calander, but require her to withdraw her applications from those schools if she is admitted to her ED school. That the AAMC has not reformed the system in this way, I cannot imagine.
Judd