Apex

Time Stamp: 1:19PM Jan 29th Invite/reject: R IP/OOP: IP SWOMEN (Y/N): N 2YGPA: 3.78 MCAT (CHEM/CARS/BIO/PSYCH): 129/128/128 Essays (X/8): 8/8 Was initially rejected for not meeting cutoffs despite meeting them. I emailed them to let them know of the situation and it appears that they re-evaluated my file and was still not able to give me an invite due to my non-academic assessment. While it wasn't the news I wanted, just going to keep my chin up and work on those essays for next year. Good luck to everyone who received an interview!

I really hope not. It seems like someone else already got a "regular" rejection letter in this thread so fingers crossed! I do wonder what the process is though if they did make a mistake. Do they just read our essays now and decide?

I have the same issue.

Went by like a blur. Do you guys know if everyone gets the same questions or is there a variety?

I disagree with the above comment. Queen's estimated cutoffs from past interview threads has consistently shown a 506-508 MCAT cutoffs with 125/126+ in each section and sometimes 127+ in CARS. Your overall score easily clears the previous cutoffs and you have a good spread. I would not say your MCAT is borderline. I would not rewrite with respect to Queen's. Western may jump back up to 128 CARS but no one can really know ahead of time. If you have a good GPA, I'd stick with that MCAT and apply broadly.

I want a clarification on this as well. In their FAQ, they mentioned that the winter semester grades are counted as pass fail only. However it's not clear to me whether this means that the fall semester is eligible to be one of the two years in the wGPA calculation. Furthermore, the process they used before to calculate wGPA was to average all the courses taken in the past two years. When two years have equal course load, it works out to be the same as averaging each year's courses, then averaging the two years. However, for 2019/2020 studies, most applicants are only going to have 3-5 co

Is it certain that it's now a hard cap on the number of FCE you can drop? I thought it could be interpreted in another way that you can drop 2.0 FCE per year if you are eligible, which goes more along their stated goal of welcoming students from diverse backgrounds. While from their sentence structure this seems unlikely, I don't see how making a more strict wGPA calculation formula would increase diversity.

Time Stamp: 10:46am Invite/reject: Reject IP/OOP: IP SWOMEN (Y/N): N 2YGPA: 3.75 MCAT (CHEM/CARS/BIO/PSYCH): 129/128/128 Essays (X/8): 8/8 Guess I'll rework those essays for next year.

Did your email specify that you missed the cutoff and that was the reason for rejection?

Did you meet the cutoffs in each of your 2 best years? If that is the case and you met all the other MCAT cutoffs, I'd strongly urge you to contact the admissions office right away.

Congrats on the invite. Out of curiosity, what was your wGPA? Did you not post wGPA because you did not qualify? 3.71 is definitely the lowest I've seen for undergrad GPA cutoffs.

I'm not sure which part of the policy you're referring to but Western changed their second degree policy in 2015 if I recall correctly. Unfortunately this left some prospective second applicants to change the structure of their second degree in order to conform to the new policy (I myself included). I don't believe any consideration is given on when you completed your second degree; it has to meet the policy standards.

I am a second degree applicant and I've done extensive research on this topic both reading their policies, speaking to them on the phone and also in person. AFAIK, you would be considered a second degree applicant, thus all of your first degree GPA would not be eligible AT ALL to be used in your GPA calculation. However, the school year is not over; why not speak to your faculty academic office and change your status to a special student in the same faculty? Sounds like you have no intentions of finishing this "second degree" so why not simply change your status to a non-program specific fu

I feel like if it does have an impact on cutoffs, it won't necessarily be a hard cutoff for CARS. I say this because 128 vs 129 is 89 and 95 percentile respectively. Dropping CARS to 128 essentially doubles the applicant pool assuming the percentile ranks is reflective of the Canadian Pre-med population. This would net you a lot more than closer to 1000 students by reducing just 1 category of the MCAT. My most suspected mechanism for the aABS this year is still that it'll be used as a red flag criteria like the reference letters, or that this is a test year. However, another case th

I definitely don't disagree with your logic, but I simply wanted to share what I was told specifically by the the admissions office. The lady whom I had a chat with was unable to divulge a ton of information about the aABS but she seemed adamant on the fact that it will not impact cutoffs. How is this going to work? I don't know. There is no flaw in your logic with regards to the impact of the aABS should have on the cutoff if it is going to affect the pre-interview selection process. However since I've been given information that it will not impact the cutoff directly from the admissions