Is it really this hard?

WayOutWestMom
Thu, 03 May 2012 21:44:07 +0000

I know at D1’s school that GPAs for middle class Hispanics (particularly those who live in the state’s largest population centers or Los Alamos and therefore have access to the best schools) and white kids are essentially identical, same is true for MCAT scores (maybe 1-3 points lower).

And I agree with somemom, the MCAT is not a perfect predictor of med school success. I saw an article a while ago (and please don’t ask me for a citation–I have no idea where I read it) where a med school Dean said that basically he thought that anyone who could score a 27 or better on the MCAT was perfectly capable of succeeding in at just about any med school in the US, but the schools needed some way to reduce the mind-boggling numbers of applications they had to wade through every year so used GPA+MCAT to eliminate some so they had a chance to actually read the rest…