Berkeley vs. Cornell for Pre-med Re-visited

[sakky]

<p>

so happily posts is representative of <150 out of >500 medical applicants at Berkeley, and to prove to norcalguy that Berkeley produces more med school applicants than Cornell does (norcalguy claimed otherwise). Thus the point of the link was simply to show that anyone quoting stats on Berkeley med admissions is working on incomplete data…and a non-random sampling and hence I was showing that the data can’t be used to argue for or against favoring or disfavoring Berkeley’s pre-med admissions over any other school’s.

</p>

<p>Uh, I believe that you have made a major logical mistake. You say that the Berkeley premed data is incomplete. This is true. On the other hand, you assume that the Cornell premed data is complete. This is not true. BOTH sets of data are incomplete. In fact, all premed data of any kind from any school will be inherently incomplete simply because no school can force all of their students to report whether they got in and if so, at which schools. </p>

<p>In fact, the most comprehensive data that can be found anywhere is the AAMC/AMCAS data, which shows that, in 2005, 605 Berkeleyians (of all races) applied to med-school, compared to 441 Cornellians.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2005/mwhite.htm[/url]”>http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2005/mwhite.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>So when you recompute the figures, you get the following:</p>

<p>Berkeley:605 applicants/23000 undergrads = 0.02630
Cornell:441 applicants/13000 undergrads = 0.03384</p>

<p>So, actually, it is actually CORNELL that has a higher proportion of its students applying to med-school. And the published data of the voluntary surveys indicates that Cornell does indeed have a slightly higher admit rate. One could argue that the Berkeley data is skewed (because, like you said, not every Berkeley premed reported in), but the Cornell data is skewed too because not every Cornell premed reported in. I don’t know of any reason why the Berkeley data would be any MORE skewed than the Cornell data.</p>