How does Queens avoid racial bias in the admission process

[WaitingTooLong]

Not here to complain but genuinely curious. From what I observed, Queen's medical class is predominantly white (more so than other schools in the province)  and I heard that they have a racial quota system to make their entering class representative of the Canadian demographics. This also aligned well with my personal observations knowing people who got interviews at Queens vs those that did not over the past five years despite having similar stats. One could argue that Queen's ambiguous evaluation criteria allowed them to do this behind closed doors without the public even noticing. Obviously, this could have been all false, so my question is: Are there any measures put in place at Queens University to avoid implicit biases during the application review and to ensure applicants are all given equal considerations.  I know at some schools, such as UBC, file reviewers are blinded to applicants' names, sex/gender and age to avoid any unconscious biases.  Any thoughts are welcome and if you know of any credible sources disproving my observations, please do post as well! 

 

Thank you. 

[gangliocytoma]

Medical school admission is a 2 way street, just like residency selection. The school picks the applicants and the applicants have to pick them back (this is assuming that most people get offers to multiple schools which a large number of people do). This makes it difficult to actually know what the class will look like demographic wise. If I remember correctly, >80% of my class of 100 people came off the waitlist, so who knows what the class would have looked like if they got the people they ranked 1-100.

I'd definitely agree that Queen's as a university has a white predominant study body, and this is congruent with the demographics of the city itself. Kingston as a city lacks a lot of the amenities that places like Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, and London have, which may influence who chooses to come study medicine here (i.e. person with multiple offers in big cities, vs person with only 1 offer).

I did the file review for Queen's med a few years ago and I do believe we were blinded to all the things you mentioned, but maybe someone who has done it more recently can chime in.