Application Assessments...

[Guest Kirsteen]

Hello,

 

One tidbit of info that I found out the other day, of which I wasn't aware before: one of my pals (who's also in second year UT meds) mentioned that students were being recruited to assess medical school application autobiographic sketches. Not that it makes much difference, and it's fairly common knowledge that students are involved in the interview process, but interesting to know that they are also involved in assessing the current/past activities of their future colleagues.

 

Cheers,

Kirsteen

[Guest strider2004]

At Mac the first year students look at the applications BEFORE they reach the interview process to weed them out for the interview. 3000 applications split between over 100 students.

[Guest Jess]

Just curious... what about the case where you're assigned the sketch of an applicant you know? What measures do the med schools take to prevent that from happening?

[Guest strider2004]

I haven't reached that stage so I honestly don't know. Anything I said would only be speculation. I'm sure there's a formal way to switch applications with somebody else. At Queens, there are only about 10 people who read all the applications - 1 from 2nd year, 1 from 3rd year, some faculty and volunteering 4th years.

[Guest Carolyn]

At Mac, all first years are required to read ~30 applications. If they even remotely recognize a name, you are asked to hand it back in and they find another student to mark it (I ended up only marking 29 last year). At the same time, a group of community members and a group of faculty are asked to read the same applications. Thus each application is read and scored by 3 people. If the scores vary markedly (I don't know what they use to determine this), the admissions office looks at the remarks and may ask another student, community member or faculty member to mark the application (I.e. to try and eliminate any potential bias) and I'm not 100% sure on whether they throw out the original marker's score or average the two... Finally, the scores are all averaged and account for 50% of determining whether you get an interview. The GPA accounts for 50% as well. Most years they seem to grab the top application scores and interview them even if their GPA is really low...