<p>Seems I must post this every year to debunk the myth of Emory having a poor medical school acceptance rate:</p>
<p>Emory is an outstanding premed school with an excellent acceptance rate. They are one of the few schools that actually posts their med school acceptance numbers while most schools simply state an acceptance rate which truly has no meaning. Examine Cornell’s medical school acceptance graph and Emory’s graph. You will notice equality in the number of students accepted with similar GPA and MCAT scores. The difference is Emory has many more students apply with sub par GPA’s and sub par MCAT scores. As an example, for the 2009 year, 165 Emory applicants scored 30 or higher on the MCAT while 182 Cornell applicants scored 30 or higher. If you score 30 or higher on the MCAT and have a GPA of 3.5 or higher Emory’s acceptance rate over the past 2 years is 80%-85% while Cornell’s acceptance rate is 85%-86%. This begs the question why is Cornell’s overall acceptance rate 71% while Emory’s acceptance rate is 46%-48%. One explanation is Cornell’s data only includes students applying for the first time while Emory’s includes all Emory College applicants. Emory also has a high percentage of international students who tend to have difficulty gaining acceptance to an allopathic (MD) school. Moreover, many schools include acceptance to a DO school or a foreign medical school when calculating the medical acceptance rate. I could only find published data on Emory, Cornell, and Wash U. and find he other schools reluctance to provide such data highly suspicious when quoting such lofty medical acceptance numbers. As with all statistics, the devil is in the details. Emory is an outstanding premed school with great opportunities for meaningful undergraduate research, hospital volunteering, shadowing opportunities, and teaching opportunities as a supplemental instructor for the intro sciences. On a side note I also believe Cornell is an excellent premed school and this post is in no way an attempt to denigrate their program. Don’t take what schools tell you at face value. Statistics can be manipulated to support nearly anything someone or something is trying to sell you. Dig deeper and you will find the truth.</p>