<p>
</p>
<p>In general, med school acceptance rates are not very illusive. For example, a student is counted among the successful applicants if they get into at least one med school, even if that med school is one they would never actually want to attend. Basically, it’s closer to being a measure of how “safe” the student was in applying (imagine a high school boasting 100% acceptance rate to college–it says nothing about the caliber of schools that they are admitted to, and contrary to popular belief, not all med schools are created equal).</p>
<p>Another possible reason is that Stanford has more premed students majoring in something very hard (like bioengineering or chemistry), and their GPAs might not make the cut. I’ve heard that the med school acceptance rate for human biology majors (the most popular major on campus, and also the most popular premed major) is in the 90%+ range.</p>
<p>Other reasons that make med school acceptance rates difficult to compare is that some schools screen their premed applicants and only choose to help out those they believe will be successful (so the others don’t bother applying). For example, I’ve heard that Duke only includes statistics for the students who applied through their premed advising center, leaving out the others who might bring down their overall acceptance rate. Other colleges make the premed classes unnecessarily hard (harder than a typical intro chem/bio class, which is generally hard) in order to “weed out” or discourage premed students who wouldn’t have as good a chance.</p>
<p>Basically, there’s no point looking at overall med school acceptance rates without looking at context (what schools they got into, etc.).</p>