Jump to content
Premed 101 Forums

CARS cutoff this year?


Recommended Posts

48 minutes ago, healthscireject said:

I feel like it'll be the same. There's no way it will dip below 129. I can see it rising to 130

Same, with 5000 applicants to mac this year, I can only assume that the applicant pool is getting more competitive and hence the cutoffs only increasing

Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 hours ago, hartk48 said:

Same, with 5000 applicants to mac this year, I can only assume that the applicant pool is getting more competitive and hence the cutoffs only increasing

Well who knows. Depends on what they do with the new section. If they want to use it or not and whether they want to weigh it more heavily than other sections. We ll know in a couple of weeks or so anyways. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Neurophilic said:

Well who knows. Depends on what they do with the new section. If they want to use it or not and whether they want to weigh it more heavily than other sections. We ll know in a couple of weeks or so anyways. 

true ha - they have often changed the cut offs in surprising ways. The cut offs HAVE to reduce the applicant pool to about 450 or so - if we ever get better at something collectively then they have little choice to but increase a cut off or switch it up with another section etc. That has happened in the past (probably one of the reasons way back the VR section at the time jumped dramatically when I was in my preclerkship. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/11/2018 at 0:21 PM, hartk48 said:

Same, with 5000 applicants to mac this year, I can only assume that the applicant pool is getting more competitive and hence the cutoffs only increasing

Didn't they have 5000 applicants last year as well? Not sure if you're trying to imply that they've had a upshoot in applicants or something, but 5000 is the norm for them for a couple years now. 

 

Western had 2500 last year, but I think they might have some more this year because the CARS cutoff didn't seem as ridiculous in 2017. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, rmorelan said:

true ha - they have often changed the cut offs in surprising ways. The cut offs HAVE to reduce the applicant pool to about 450 or so - if we ever get better at something collectively then they have little choice to but increase a cut off or switch it up with another section etc. That has happened in the past (probably one of the reasons way back the VR section at the time jumped dramatically when I was in my preclerkship. 

Any insider info on section priorities? I promise I won't tell anyone ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

20 minutes ago, healthscireject said:

There's no priority. They take the top 400 MCAT scores and the lowest among those for each section is the "cutoff"

well sort of - there are any number of ways of saying what is the top MCAT score. Why are some sections worth more than others (i.e. why are some section's cut offs higher than others)? You have to decide before hand what sections you think matter, set basic cut offs for those, and then make additional adjustments to narrow down the pool to roughly the number you want (cannot be exact as the 400th and 401th person as per your example could have the exact same score). 

There are a lot of combinations of the mcat scoring that can generate the same number of people in the end :) As you can imagine when suddenly one section changes there is probably a huge amount of debate related to that - trying to justify why a particular combination is the best of of all the available ones. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 hours ago, healthscireject said:

There's no priority. They take the top 400 MCAT scores and the lowest among those for each section is the "cutoff"

There are like 16 different cutoff combinations that they could do to narrow down the top 400 applicants. They absolutely need to have internal priorities for the sections of the MCAT before they even begin looking at the applicant pool. If they prioritize the Psych/Soc section poorly, as I suspect they will, don't expect the cutoffs to change significantly from last year. It will be something boring like 126/129/128/127. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, tavenan said:

There are like 16 different cutoff combinations that they could do to narrow down the top 400 applicants. They absolutely need to have internal priorities for the sections of the MCAT before they even begin looking at the applicant pool. If they prioritize the Psych/Soc section poorly, as I suspect they will, don't expect the cutoffs to change significantly from last year. It will be something boring like 126/129/128/127. 

that is without using the GPA as well as a cut off :)

The Western GPA cut off used to be 3.75 as an example. Since you are combining the effects of both to narrow down the pool it is even worse than just 16.  There is what we would call in economics I guess a pareto optimal front which defines all the possible combinations that reduce the interview size down to about 450 or so. Any of those would work re the math. They have to pick one from those using more subjective measures. 

Now we are getting too far into the math and logic ha! Likely they won't change much as they usually don't. Big changes are rare but usually shocking when they occur. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/13/2018 at 8:58 PM, T-cell said:

What do you think the odds are that the GPA cut-off will increase again? 

total guess but unlikely as it has been stable for awhile. I usually caution about targeting just the cut offs as of course they have changed in the past and it is extremely annoying to be excluded because you were a single point off or 0.05 off a relatively low GPA. I mean obviously everyone is trying to max out whatever they can anyway but people can be a bit locked into the old cut offs as being more stable than I think they are. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...