If you were the adcom at a medical school, what would be your rules?

[lovestruck]

If I were doing admissions:

 

GPA with consideration for the difficulty of the degree would be the biggest factor. Premed degree types would be very unimpressive, like health sci or that crap.

 

Life experience with consideration for the place in life of the applicant. Johnny Appleseed might be super cool impressive with his africa trips and Rhodes scholarship, but he also went to UCC and has a very wealthy family and therefore the means to achieve these impressive feats. Billy Pickuptruck from Wawa,on the other hand, has none of these things but had to work a part-time job during university to pay the bills. I'd hazard to say the second applicant is just as impressive, and might just make a better doctor to boot given his experience as a common person.

 

Doing premed-style volunteering and other classic premed things would be given negative points.

 

Reference letters from whomever knows the applicant on a personal and professional level, and it doesn't have to be from a reclusive PhD with social skills bordering on autism to be impressive.

 

MCAT I'd love to include but given the lack of relevance of everything on it to medicine, unlike say the LSAT(logical reasoning) or GMAT(again, logical reasoning), I'm reluctant to use it. There needs to be a better test that evaluates, you guessed it, logical reasoning.

 

Interview: this is to find out the motivation for going into medicine. If its to please the parents, the recommendation would be that one should have their umbilical cord severed before becoming a doctor. Money is fine as long as its tempered in reality. Helping people alone doesn't cut it. Helping people with the responsibilities of a leader however does....etc.

 

None of this MMI crap. Med admissions committees are incredulously pretentious in how they select their students, as if they are entering some sort of ordained sainthood. Contrast this to basically every other profession, which does it the old-fashioned time tested way of interviews and marks. Plus, these stupid new techniques do nothing to produce better physicians. They just make admissions committees look like they're earning their keep. Stupid.

 

100% agree. Especially on the hardness of degree thing. I don't understand how the GPA of someone doing a BSc in Biochem and a BA in Fine Arts can even begin to be comparable????

 

Also, some typical premed activities could be acceptable as long as there was a very good explanation that did not involve the statement "well I saw on premed101 that I should do this...".

[future_doc]

Those with music & law degrees make excellent physicians and their non-scientific backgrounds are not impediments although they have to work harder.

[TheBoss]

One of my pet peeves is when people make qualitative judgements with absolutely no evidence to back it up.

 

EDIT:

VVV

[PhoenixFlare500]

One of my pet peeves is when people make qualitative judgements with absolutely no evidence to back it up.

 

Your post is crap.

QED

[Dongzhuo]

If I were dean of admissions:

 

Extracurricular cutoffs- all ec's read and assigned a score lowest 20th percentile rejected

 

The remaining candidates will get an academic score 70% gpa and 30% mcat.

Gap needs to be adjusted regarding rigour of program and school prestige. Ie MIT physics degree weighted more compared to lakehead communications degree.

 

Select 2/3 of the higher ranked candidates and interview MMI and panel.

 

Final consideration 50% academic 25% MMI 25% panel

 

Admitted

[AtomSmasher2]

Here's what my rules would be:

 

The final admission decision is based 100% on your university average.

 

The OMSAS GPA system is unfair, because schools like U of T get the same conversions as party schools like UWO. To adjust for this, if you attended a serious school like U of T, you would get a 5% bonus on your average, but if you attended a goofball party school like Mac or UWO, you get -5% for that.

 

Your first year of university would have a weighting factor of 3. Your second year would have a weighting factor of 2. Each subsequent year would have a weighting factor of 1. Why? Your early years are most representative of how studious you actually are. Every year, 1st years come in, want to go to medical school, party hard, and get CRAP marks. Only after 2 years of being kicked in the ass do they finally shape up. Plus, 3rd year and 4th year courses are TOO EASY compared to lower year courses, because the departments have to compete for students to take their courses. On the contrary, consider the nerdy studious kids who actually don't party and goof off in 1st and 2nd year, and get good marks. THOSE are the people we want to be doctors, not the knucklehead bar stars. So if you were one of those ****heads who got **** marks in 1st and 2nd year because you were too busy trying to get laid and going to bars, you're going to be severely punished for that.

 

Interview

There would be an interview, where your final average is adjusted based on the answers you give. This school would value HONESTY, not because honest people make better doctors, but out of principle.

 

There would be a series of questions, and annoying/fake/hippy/typical premed answers would be given negative points, whereas honest answers would give points.

 

For example:

 

Question: "Why did you volunteer at the hospital?"

 

BAD Answer: "I just wanted to help the community, people in need, do my part, etc." RESULT: -2% taken off your average

GOOD Answer: "I heard medical school admissions committees like to see that kind of stuff." RESULT: +1% added to your average.

 

Question: "Why do you want to become a doctor?"

 

BAD Answer: "I want to help people, want to do research, cure cancer, blah blah blah premed bull****..." RESULT: -5% taken off your average.

GOOD Answer: "Mostly for the money and prestige, but it seems like interesting work too." RESULT: +2% added to your average.

 

Question: "What is the relationship between Medicine, Science, and Art?"

 

BAD Answer: "Medicine is an art in that..." RESULT: -1% taken off your average

GOOD Answer: "What kind of bull**** question is this?" RESULT: +5% added to your average, for realizing that this wasn't a serious question and only a test.

 

Note that bad answers usually take away a higher magnitude of points compared to good answers.

 

Humanities degrees

People with these degrees can still apply, but lose 15% from their university average. Why? Medicine is a science. By taking an arts degree, you haven't proven yourself capable of handling science classes. Basically, the only way you could get in at this school if you had a humanities degree would be to have a 95% average and give honest answers during the interview.

 

Graduate Degrees

If you got a masters, you lose 1% from your cumulative average. If you got a PhD, you lose 4% from your cumulative average. Why? The fact that a graduate student is applying to medical school shows that he wasn't dedicated to what he was doing (academia). It would be analagous to someone doing 2 years of Nursing, dropping out, then doing 4 years of engineering. It shows that a person like that can't make a decision and stick with it.

 

MCAT

 

Not considered.

 

ECs

 

Doing ECs that NORMAL people do, like working out, playing sports, having friends, being in a band, having a job etc. do not influence your score.

Doing ECs that premeds do, like research, volunteering, etc. are met with the applicant losing 1% per bull**** EC on his ABS.

 

Decisions:

Admission decisions would be sent out in late November.

[JB.]

Here's what my rules would be:

 

The final admission decision is based 100% on your university average.

 

The OMSAS GPA system is unfair, because schools like U of T get the same conversions as party schools like UWO. To adjust for this, if you attended a serious school like U of T, you would get a 5% bonus on your average, but if you attended a goofball party school like Mac or UWO, you get -5% for that.

 

Your first year of university would have a weighting factor of 3. Your second year would have a weighting factor of 2. Each subsequent year would have a weighting factor of 1. Why? Your early years are most representative of how studious you actually are. Every year, 1st years come in, want to go to medical school, party hard, and get CRAP marks. Only after 2 years of being kicked in the ass do they finally shape up. Plus, 3rd year and 4th year courses are TOO EASY compared to lower year courses, because the departments have to compete for students to take their courses. On the contrary, consider the nerdy studious kids who actually don't party and goof off in 1st and 2nd year, and get good marks. THOSE are the people we want to be doctors, not the knucklehead bar stars. So if you were one of those ****heads who got **** marks in 1st and 2nd year because you were too busy trying to get laid and going to bars, you're going to be severely punished for that.

 

Interview

There would be an interview, where your final average is adjusted based on the answers you give. This school would value HONESTY, not because honest people make better doctors, but out of principle.

 

There would be a series of questions, and annoying/fake/hippy/typical premed answers would be given negative points, whereas honest answers would give points.

 

For example:

 

Question: "Why did you volunteer at the hospital?"

 

BAD Answer: "I just wanted to help the community, people in need, do my part, etc." RESULT: -2% taken off your average

GOOD Answer: "I heard medical school admissions committees like to see that kind of stuff." RESULT: +1% added to your average.

 

Question: "Why do you want to become a doctor?"

 

BAD Answer: "I want to help people, want to do research, cure cancer, blah blah blah premed bull****..." RESULT: -5% taken off your average.

GOOD Answer: "Mostly for the money and prestige, but it seems like interesting work too." RESULT: +2% added to your average.

 

Question: "What is the relationship between Medicine, Science, and Art?"

 

BAD Answer: "Medicine is an art in that..." RESULT: -1% taken off your average

GOOD Answer: "What kind of bull**** question is this?" RESULT: +5% added to your average, for realizing that this wasn't a serious question and only a test.

 

Note that bad answers usually take away a higher magnitude of points compared to good answers.

 

Humanities degrees

People with these degrees can still apply, but lose 15% from their university average. Why? Medicine is a science. By taking an arts degree, you haven't proven yourself capable of handling science classes. Basically, the only way you could get in at this school if you had a humanities degree would be to have a 95% average and give honest answers during the interview.

 

Graduate Degrees

If you got a masters, you lose 1% from your cumulative average. If you got a PhD, you lose 4% from your cumulative average. Why? The fact that a graduate student is applying to medical school shows that he wasn't dedicated to what he was doing (academia). It would be analagous to someone doing 2 years of Nursing, dropping out, then doing 4 years of engineering. It shows that a person like that can't make a decision and stick with it.

 

MCAT

 

Not considered.

 

ECs

 

Doing ECs that NORMAL people do, like working out, playing sports, having friends, being in a band, having a job etc. do not influence your score.

Doing ECs that premeds do, like research, volunteering, etc. are met with the applicant losing 1% per bull**** EC on his ABS.

 

Decisions:

Admission decisions would be sent out in late November.

 

Back again, eh?

[apache]

The "application" of medicine is an art. When I say art, I mean a mental process that cannot be described, verbalized, described in language, because the constructs used are too abstract to explain, it's what people call intuition, because in our society, if you can't explain the process (often because there are no words to describe abstract mental processes, and people who have algorithmized them actually use them so quickly that their working memory cannot recall them in order to describe each process, which in and of itself would take paragraphs. You're making yourself look like an idiot. Someone with a philosophy degree and a year of a basic science degree will more often than not be better suited to the clinical practice of medicine than someone with four years of physiology.

 

In the humanities, you learn generalizable, abstract thinking skills, that have high crossover ability when you learn another particular "skill" set. I hate to say it to you, but people who are the best doctors have to learn to think like mechanics, because the material is so overwhelming. The best doctors, however, learn how to derive answers from basic information by clustering different cognitive functions and using abstract pattern recognition, thus reducing their cognitive load. In other words, they learn that they don't have to learn everything, just concepts, and from the concepts you can derive conclusions, but because they've been doing this for 4 years, they do it with much more ease than the average science graduate, and while they start off initially behind, they are often in the most cerebrally demanding specialties (which I personally consider to be psychiatry to be, if you are the par excellence of your specialty). Other specialties, like neurology, which are more nebulous are also suited to these more intuitive thinkers. In other words, if there is no obvious answer to the question, you're often better having an humanities grad doc on board.

 

I wrote this in 10 minutes, it's pretty complex, not because I'm smart, but because I learned to see generalizable clusters of recurring events in arguments, know how to be malleable in my thought, and how to postulate multiple conclusions from the basics (basic physiology for example). I really doubt many science grads could really write this at all, unless they had a keen interest in discussing more nebulous topics.

 

I'll also add that throughout your career, you'll have to interpret research, and once you learn the basic biology of research, no one is better than deconstructing flaws in research in science than psychology grads, because it's the most undefinable topic we consider to be within the domain of scientific inquiry, meaning we scrutinize our research to extreme measures, and are used to picking apart everything and everything that could be wrong with a study.

 

Here's what my rules would be:

 

The final admission decision is based 100% on your university average.

 

The OMSAS GPA system is unfair, because schools like U of T get the same conversions as party schools like UWO. To adjust for this, if you attended a serious school like U of T, you would get a 5% bonus on your average, but if you attended a goofball party school like Mac or UWO, you get -5% for that.

 

Your first year of university would have a weighting factor of 3. Your second year would have a weighting factor of 2. Each subsequent year would have a weighting factor of 1. Why? Your early years are most representative of how studious you actually are. Every year, 1st years come in, want to go to medical school, party hard, and get CRAP marks. Only after 2 years of being kicked in the ass do they finally shape up. Plus, 3rd year and 4th year courses are TOO EASY compared to lower year courses, because the departments have to compete for students to take their courses. On the contrary, consider the nerdy studious kids who actually don't party and goof off in 1st and 2nd year, and get good marks. THOSE are the people we want to be doctors, not the knucklehead bar stars. So if you were one of those ****heads who got **** marks in 1st and 2nd year because you were too busy trying to get laid and going to bars, you're going to be severely punished for that.

 

Interview

There would be an interview, where your final average is adjusted based on the answers you give. This school would value HONESTY, not because honest people make better doctors, but out of principle.

 

There would be a series of questions, and annoying/fake/hippy/typical premed answers would be given negative points, whereas honest answers would give points.

 

For example:

 

Question: "Why did you volunteer at the hospital?"

 

BAD Answer: "I just wanted to help the community, people in need, do my part, etc." RESULT: -2% taken off your average

GOOD Answer: "I heard medical school admissions committees like to see that kind of stuff." RESULT: +1% added to your average.

 

Question: "Why do you want to become a doctor?"

 

BAD Answer: "I want to help people, want to do research, cure cancer, blah blah blah premed bull****..." RESULT: -5% taken off your average.

GOOD Answer: "Mostly for the money and prestige, but it seems like interesting work too." RESULT: +2% added to your average.

 

Question: "What is the relationship between Medicine, Science, and Art?"

 

BAD Answer: "Medicine is an art in that..." RESULT: -1% taken off your average

GOOD Answer: "What kind of bull**** question is this?" RESULT: +5% added to your average, for realizing that this wasn't a serious question and only a test.

 

Note that bad answers usually take away a higher magnitude of points compared to good answers.

 

Humanities degrees

People with these degrees can still apply, but lose 15% from their university average. Why? Medicine is a science. By taking an arts degree, you haven't proven yourself capable of handling science classes. Basically, the only way you could get in at this school if you had a humanities degree would be to have a 95% average and give honest answers during the interview.

 

Graduate Degrees

If you got a masters, you lose 1% from your cumulative average. If you got a PhD, you lose 4% from your cumulative average. Why? The fact that a graduate student is applying to medical school shows that he wasn't dedicated to what he was doing (academia). It would be analagous to someone doing 2 years of Nursing, dropping out, then doing 4 years of engineering. It shows that a person like that can't make a decision and stick with it.

 

MCAT

 

Not considered.

 

ECs

 

Doing ECs that NORMAL people do, like working out, playing sports, having friends, being in a band, having a job etc. do not influence your score.

Doing ECs that premeds do, like research, volunteering, etc. are met with the applicant losing 1% per bull**** EC on his ABS.

 

Decisions:

Admission decisions would be sent out in late November.

[thehumanmacbook]

I love it, but I still have a few disagreements.

 

1. If you can rock out on a liberal arts degree, you are more prepared for medicine than the bookworm prehealthscilabtech. The field of medicine is the most subjective thing going once clinicals hit, and if you can manage to impress some blowhard academic into giving you A+s in whatever liberal arts degree, you've got some mighty fine talent for BS that'll do well in medicine.

 

2. Leadership would be seen as an asset, but the standards would be set high. Winning a gold medal at the Olympics is not leadership - its been done by others before you. Being the president of the premed club is not leadership - its useless. Starting your own charity from the ground up is leadership. Starting a business from the ground up is leadership. Basically making something from nothing would be considered leadership. Medicine needs more leaders to make the decisions about health care because right now the politicians are doing it.

 

3. If one can hold a job AND manage to smoke A+s in undergrad, that should be considered an asset.

 

And more of an agreement:

 

If you did any volunteering in AAAFFRRRICAAAAAA or insert-third-world-country here, you should be banned from applying anymore. It's so hamfisted. There are third world countries in your own backyard yet these glory hogs want to do the sexy thing and help out the overseas kids since they don't deserve their poverty unlike our own poor. <-

 

This. Add India to the list as well...there are SO many ads and a specialization at Mac that pushes this to an extreme. Out of an entire specialization, only one guy I know spent his time in Northern Canada...and then he quit the specialization because of this exact reason.

 

Research will not be considered at all. MDs need to become more in tune with medicine and the leadership aspects of it(which are ever so ignored in medical education) and less preoccupied with clinical trials-du-jour.

 

I agree with many of the points above, with perhaps the exception of research. I think research should be heavily considered if you're pursuing an MD/PhD, along with all the criteria stated.

[Dongzhuo]

I love it, but I still have a few disagreements.

 

1. If you can rock out on a liberal arts degree, you are more prepared for medicine than the bookworm prehealthscilabtech. The field of medicine is the most subjective thing going once clinicals hit, and if you can manage to impress some blowhard academic into giving you A+s in whatever liberal arts degree, you've got some mighty fine talent for BS that'll do well in medicine.

 

2. Leadership would be seen as an asset, but the standards would be set high. Winning a gold medal at the Olympics is not leadership - its been done by others before you. Being the president of the premed club is not leadership - its useless. Starting your own charity from the ground up is leadership. Starting a business from the ground up is leadership. Basically making something from nothing would be considered leadership. Medicine needs more leaders to make the decisions about health care because right now the politicians are doing it.

 

3. If one can hold a job AND manage to smoke A+s in undergrad, that should be considered an asset.

 

And more of an agreement:

 

If you did any volunteering in AAAFFRRRICAAAAAA or insert-third-world-country here, you should be banned from applying anymore. It's so hamfisted. There are third world countries in your own backyard yet these glory hogs want to do the sexy thing and help out the overseas kids since they don't deserve their poverty unlike our own poor.

 

Research will not be considered at all. MDs need to become more in tune with medicine and the leadership aspects of it(which are ever so ignored in medical education) and less preoccupied with clinical trials-du-jour.

 

Atomsmasher, you have turned into the second brooksbane. Another cynical poster I like is Blackjack. It's always nice to have people who put out the un sugarcoated truth.

[TheBoss]

If you did any volunteering in AAAFFRRRICAAAAAA or insert-third-world-country here, you should be banned from applying anymore.

 

Sometimes I disagree with brooksbane, but this is why I love having him around.

[A-Stark]

I'll also add that throughout your career, you'll have to interpret research, and once you learn the basic biology of research, no one is better than deconstructing flaws in research in science than psychology grads, because it's the most undefinable topic we consider to be within the domain of scientific inquiry, meaning we scrutinize our research to extreme measures, and are used to picking apart everything and everything that could be wrong with a study.

 

I disagree. Those best equipped to "deconstruct" flaws in research are statisticians, i.e. the ones who understand and study the methodology at its most fundamental level. But that might just be my own educational bias showing, which may have a psychological interpretation in itself.

[A-Stark]

Oh statisticians are all about bias, we even quantify it! Proper methodology will account for sample, measurement, and evaluator bias. The problem with many studies is that there is simply no adequate documentation to the standard that statisticians would like - researchers report some kind of "statistical analysis" with the results in only the most basic terms, without, for example, explaining how the analytic model assumptions were validated.