These are REALLY great detailed questions, @marcopolos! I’m so glad people are asking them in this month before the deadline on May 1st to make a more informed decision.
1) So I do not know what it has been in recent years. This is something that the UMKC School of Medicine admissions office should be willing to answer (if not, that’s a huge red flag). According to publicly released data which you can find in this article here: The University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine: T... : Academic Medicine
“As might be expected, the attrition rate in this school is higher than those of traditional four-year medical schools. Of all 3,377 students admitted at year one from 1970 through 2005, 20.6% left the program without the MD degree. However, attrition in years three through six is lower; only 161 out of the 3,377 admitted students (4.8%) withdrew or were dismissed during the last four years of the curriculum.”
Keep in mind “attrition” is those who have left the program entirely without receiving the MD degree, not those who complete the program in 7 years instead of 6 years (what is commonly known as “extending” in the program). Since then the school has attempted to address this, although I don’t know how successful they have been overall with respect to the Bachelor/MD cohort of students.
https://med.umkc.edu/docs/odi/DEI-Report.pdf
There is a statistic here in this UMKC School of Medicine DEI report where they state from 2009-2010 to 2013-2014, the retention rate of BA/MD students matriculating to Year 3 of the program was 85% (which would make the attrition rate in Years 1-2 at 15%, like you mentioned). When it comes to Years 3-6, on average from 2011-2012 to 2015-2016, the graduation rate of BA/MD and MD only students (meaning both students together, not just BA/MD students) obtaining their medical degrees was 93% (meaning the attrition rate in Years 3-6 of both student groups was 7%).
You can compare those UMKC School of Medicine statistics to those of US allopathic medical schools overall: https://www.aamc.org/media/48526/download
Looking at graduation rates of students enrolled between 1998-1999 and 2017-2018, the average attrition rate at 4 year U.S. allopathic medical schools is around 3.2%. Students in combined Bachelor-MD programs had the highest attrition rate at 5.7%.
Of what drives attrition in the UMKC BA/MD program, I think it’s a variety of factors – some of it is due to academics, but it can also be due to non-academic factors (change of career interests, personal circumstances like family issues, health problems, or financial difficulties, burnout from the program itself due to the accelerated nature with limited breaks unlike other Bachelor/MD programs). These are more broad categories that I’m referring to.
In terms of number of people who actually leave the program, I’m not sure if it’s necessarily a function of being in-state vs. out-of-state (this program only takes 10-15 out-of-staters and so in-staters drastically outnumber that group) as each student is different, although I do think that if one is out-of-state, there are already more external incentives for the person to complete the program, due to the amount of money already invested at the out-of-state tuition rate, unlike an in-state person who pays a lot less tuition in total.
2) UMKC still has letter graded preclinicals. As you probably know by now, the trend is toward Pass/Fail grading in the preclinical years but UMKC does not do that even for MD onlys in the program.
You can see that data here: Grading Systems Used in Medical School Programs | AAMC
At UMKC, all required undergraduate science courses (Year 1 Anatomy + Lab, Year 1 Microbiology + Lab, General Chem I & II + Labs, Organic Chem + Lab, Cell Biology, Genetics), BMS (basic medical science) courses, Clinical Correlations (a concurrently running course with Human Structure Function although credit is awarded in the summer semester), and Pathology I & II are letter graded and are used to calculate the School of Medicine Cumulative Science GPA. This is an internally tracked metric from Year 1 till the end of Year 3 for promotion purposes.
That being said, in terms of graduation latin honors in Year 6, it’s the cumulative GPA (meaning all courses that you’ve taken at UMKC) that is a part of the calculation. The GPA that is calculated is a Year 1-6 GPA. Hope that makes sense. I am not sure what the average cumulative GPA or average School of Medicine Cumulative Science GPA are and those figures have likely not been released publicly.
3) If your choice is between a BS/DO program vs. a BS/MD program, I would go with the latter (BS/MD), although it depends on the specialties that you’re interested in and the DO school in question. I also would not sell yourself short by being locked into a DO school so early in the process, as DO schools tend to have slightly lower average GPA and MCAT requirements at baseline and higher acceptance rates just in the normal admissions process.