Pre-Med Hopkins! Help! Help!

afan
Sat, 25 Jun 2005 23:17:33 +0000

Well my complaint is not the practice of the committee letters, but the apparent obstructionist attitude. Having recommendations come from a committee could be quite helpful to the admissions committee, if they provided additional relevant information. However, I get the sense that this process divides the applicants into high probability and low probability groups, and the committee letters simply reinforce this conclusion. I can see the student’s MCAT’s and grades, I don’t need a committee to tell me that 42 and 3.9 means high likelihood of admission and 27 and 3.2 mean poor prospects. Tell me something about this kid that I do not know. I am not really interested in the committee’s opinion about whether the student should be a doctor unless there is something really unique about her/him. Perhaps there is. Perhaps the remainder of the application does not really convey the depth of the student’s commitment to service, or her talent for research. Then tell me that. But don’t waste my time just repeating the numerical information.

Requiring students to get the letters also ensures that every med school applicant is followed by the premed office, and that they do not slip through the cracks. The question is whether the premed office serves as an advocate for the students, or a gatekeeper. If an advocate, then the required letters can be helpful. If a gatekeeper, then it is harmful to all but the top applicants.

I have a problem with the notion that the committee will determine which students “deserve” to be doctors, as Collegiate puts it. Who are they to decide who deserves to be a doctor? Yes, I would like to be warned about someone who barely made it through, with good grades but lots of questions about his honesty. Or someone who was hostile and abusive in her clinic experiences. But these cases are rare.

The premed office should not take the attitude that “We decide who deserves to be a doctor, and these are the only people we support. We tell the others not to apply. If they ignore our advice, then our letter will reflect our annoyance with them.” Instead the office should have the attitude that “We help every student who wants to apply. We provide advice on mechanics of the application process, strategy, and prospects for admission. If a student’s chances are poor, we tell them that, and give them advice as to what they can do to improve them. In theory, if we had a student who was dishonest, unbalanced, or for some other reason unsuitable for the practice of medicine we would withhold our endorsement, but fortunately this has not come up. With that exception, we support any student who wants to apply. We have great students and they make great doctors.” Which office would you rather approach as you contemplated applying to medical school?

This has nothing to do with how much one pays in tuition.

In case you don’t know, you need a sky high GPA and excellent MCAT scores to be a good med school applicant, but not to be a good doctor. GPA and MCAT predict med school grades in basic science courses quite well, but they are nearly useless in predicting how good a doctor someone will be. So selecting people who “deserve” to go to medical school on this basis will give you a class of people who get good basic science grades, but not necessarily anything of importance.

Since there is a substantial element of chance in admissions, acceptance rates that are very high mean that only sure bets are applying. It would be perfectly reasonable for an individual, told that she has only a 50-50 chance at admissions, to decide not to bother. But to get admissions rates in the 90’s, one must be discouraging lots of people whose chances are in the 80’s. If admissions were perfectly predictable, then the admissions rate should be 100%, everyone who applies does so knowing they will get in, and everyone else knows they will not be admitted, so they do not waste their time. In reality, there is a wide zone of uncertainty. So to get the success rate up that high, lots of people with good chances must be deciding not to apply. This may be because THE STUDENTS decide that it is not worth the time, effort, and psychological risk to apply if success probability is below 95%. Fine. But it should not be school policy to attempt to enforce such a standard.

For these reasons, I am worried about places with extremely high success rates. Some of them may simply have highly risk-averse student bodies. Students are told their success probability is 85% and they do not apply. Other schools are practicing some version of active discouragement of applications from lower probability applicants.

The most honest thing a college could do is to emulate Cornell. Post a table of the success rates as a function of GPA and MCAT scores. Students can see where they stand on this data and make up their own minds. For some kids the threshold for “worth the trouble” will be 90%, for others it will be 30%. This is a decision for the student, not for the school.