<p>Hey all!</p>
<p>A long time ago, I remember reading somewhere here about about adding MCAT and GPA together to see if you’re over a certain number. </p>
<p>This way, you could gauge if you may get through the first stage of med school admissions (before they send you the secondary forms).</p>
<p>Does anyone know what I am talking about? thanks</p>
<p>I think it’s called the index or something like that…</p>
<p>GPA x10 + MCAT</p>
<p>I had never heard of it until I started on this board…But I think I remember BDM saying that a 70 is considered competitive in general (ie 4.0 and 30) while for schools like WashU or JHU, you need a 75+.</p>
<p>Yeah, the index (my term) is just a way to discuss MCAT and GPA simultaneously. The advantage is that it weights them roughly equally, which is approximately correct.</p>
<p>The disadvantage is that it doesn’t discuss balance at all, which is not so good. I’ve often considered adding in a balance modifier, i.e. {10<em>GPA+MCAT - min[(|10</em>GPA-MCAT|-2),0]} or something like that, but then that just gets too complicated.</p>
<p>What kind of index you “need”, of course, depends wildly on your other qualifications. Generally speaking, the national average is, I think, approximately a 66 for entrance into medical school. This is approximately the index (for 2004) at Wake, Tufts, etc.</p>
<p>As an ORM, I decided early on that I didn’t think I’d stand a chance at any school where I wasn’t beating the index by a substantial margin. Harvard and JHU had 2004 average indices of about 73, if I recall correctly, so in my case, I would not advise, say, a Korean person to apply with anything less than a 76.</p>
<p>Now, I also want to mention that secondaries from private schools (Vanderbilt is the only exception that I know of) are sent to all applicants. Using numbers to screen for secondaries is not a correct hypothesis.</p>
<p>That sounds right for a nat’l average: roughly a 3.6 gpa and a 30 mcat are the national averages.</p>
<p>Yeah. I should probably have been using BCPM GPA rather than overall, to be honest. Oh well.</p>
<p>hey thanks for replying!! =)</p>
<p>More questions:
<p>Thanks in advance =)</p>
<p>wait, i’m sorry I just realized you said BCPM gpa at the end. So that is more accurate to use…</p>
<p>1.) BCPM probably is a better estimate. I just wanted to be honest that that wasn’t what I used.</p>
<p>2.) The idea is that a kid with a 2.9, 44 (73) is not a good candidate, and neither is a kid with a 4.0, 28 (68), even though both those indices are actually pretty decent. In other words, it’s better to have a 3.3, 33 than a 2.6, 40 - i.e. you want about half your index points to come from each of your MCAT and GPA. I built in roughly a 2 point margin of error, but you could probably go up noticeably higher and be fine.**</p>
<p>One of the reasons I don’t bother with this is that the way I described it is not quite right. A 3.5, 31 is probably better than a 3.3, 33, because your GPA should be above a certain threshold - so you see that there are many complex revisions to make to the index. So I don’t bother with any.</p>
<p>**The same, by the way, applies to your MCAT subsections. a 15-15-6 gives you a 36, a very strong score, but you would almost certainly not be admitted to any medical schools whatsoever.</p>
<p>And then consider that I think it varies from school to school. Schools that are considered “highly selective”, in fact, will probably be more forgiving of students who are “unbalanced” towards their MCATs; schools that are less so probably draw mostly from students who are unbalanced towards the GPAs.</p>
<p>My point is that there’s a lot of modifications that we could consider which the index doesn’t really capture. I just use it as a handy rule of thumb.</p>
<p>Thank you for replying so quick and in detail =)</p>
<p>btw, thanks for all of your posts on these threads…you are definitely one of the most helpful people I’ve seen!</p>
<p>And just think… all this and more is at your fingertips with the Duke HPAC. They’re the best. :D</p>
<p>Haha, bdm I must ahte on you only because i go to Maryland, so theres no blue devil love here. But this is pretty interesting, never heard of this before.</p>