Japanese Major

bluedevilmike
Sat, 02 Jun 2007 00:04:58 +0000

1.) http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=213924

2.)

And the MCAT?

Nah, it’s not that bad. Premeds go nuts over it because they’re neurotic by nature, not because it’s all that tough. It’s like two months of half-time (20 hrs/wk) studying. Hardly worth the neurosis that seems to accompany it.

3.) Actually a 27 and a 29 aren’t that low. A 30 is the national average for students who are admitted. If you assume the mean is roughly equal to the median – not the best assumption, but it’ll do provisionally – then that means about half of all the medical students in the country got less than a 30. So (roughly) a 29 puts you at about the 48th percentile – not by any means close to the border of what it would take to get into medical school in general.

4.) I think what you may be feeling is partly a reflection of the insanity of CA medical school admissions, where our lowest-ranked public school (Davis) has a median of 32 (!). [I am assuming that many of your friends applied to CA publics, which aren’t that much cheaper anyway.]



Statistical Note:
There are 18,000 students admitted to medical school in any given year, and the MCAT is structured to score on a bell-curve, so you’d think that the mean would probably be pretty close to the median – except that, actually, the bell curve is centered around the test-takers’ mean of 24, not the matriculants’ mean of 30. So really what you’re seeing is the latter half (or so) of the bell curve, meaning that it’s hugely skewed right – so the median should actually be much LOWER than the mean, meaning that probably the median is in the 27 range or so.