Med school acceptance rate (overall)?

afan
Fri, 27 Oct 2006 17:01:30 +0000

There are so many med school applicants from medical families that this alone is unlikely to be much help.

If you get good grades and MCAT’s, then medical school is not nearly such a gamble. The poor admissions numbers are due to lots of applicants who, on paper, do not have good prospects, but who apply anyway. Most elite colleges say that an MCAT of ~30 is a solid basis for applying. This is way above the national mean, and as noted, about the mean for accepted applicants. So… if you are doing well in your premed courses, and do well on standardized tests, then you will probably do well on the MCAT. If you present good grades and MCAT’s, then with careful applying your chances are quite good.

Not everyone who bails out of premed does so because of poor grades. Some realize they don’t want to be doctors. Some find science more interesting. Some find neither medicine nor science to their liking. A lot of freshmen say they are premed not because it is a firm career commitment, but because they do not know enough about the rest of the world to have considered other options.