1) I agree. 15% is relatively high, although it’s an improvement from what it has traditionally been at 20.6%. And that’s just an average. I imagine there are some years where a particular BA/MD class loses a lot of people (not just people who extend to 7 or 8 years and later graduate with their BA and MD, but people who fully leave the UMKC School of Medicine).
Year 1 & 2 of the program is considered the “undergraduate part” (even though students are taking courses like med school level biochemistry and med school level anatomy, histology, embryology, and physiology) so the med school can readily attribute that to high schooler or undergraduate regret. They can’t easily do that as much for the last 4 years of the program which would coincide with a traditional 4 year allopathic medical school.
The history of Bachelor/MD programs in the United States in terms of how and why they started is quite interesting from a historical perspective. I don’t fault very bright, hardworking, and dedicated high school students and their parents (many of whom want nothing but the best for them in terms of career success) to gravitate towards these type of programs.
UMKC is one of the few medical schools where it was sort of built from the ground up as a 6 year Bachelor/MD program in the 1970s (this was during a time of a projected physician shortage in the United States). This is in contrast to other Bachelor/MD programs across the country where that cohort actually joins a class of traditional 4 + 4 and non-trad matriculants for the last 4 years of medical school. And now, UMKC is one of the only 6 year Bachelor/MD programs left in the country besides Howard University, and that program only takes about 12 people. All the others, like NEOUCOM (now NEOMED), Penn State/Jefferson Medical College (now known as Sidney Kimmel Medical College), Northwestern HPME, Boston University, Miami Miller HPME, etc. that were 6 years either extended it to 7 or 8, or got rid of it entirely.
The UMKC School of Medicine has always sort of revolved around the 6 year Bachelor/MD program model, as reflected in when the “MD only” students join which is in January of what would be our Year 2 for BA/MD students, instead of July or August when most med schools start. I think it was an innovative aspect of medical school education for its time (https://med.umkc.edu/six-years-two-degrees/). Whether that’s still the case today I think depends on who you talk to and their personal experience.
This was from a while back (https://www.kcur.org/health/2006-09-24/med-school-express), but one UMKC School of Medicine administrator (who came to the med school when it first opened in 1971, retired in 2012, and passed away in late 2020) had the quote: “Well, it is intense and certainly the program is not for everybody, in some ways I think about it as getting on a merry-go-round and you better stay on that merry-go-round and you daren’t fall off.” – It’s a very fitting quote, I think, of what the 6 year BA/MD program, which does not have any extended breaks, can sometimes feel like for students in the moment.
2) So in terms of the residency match and in interviews, your actual grades in preclinical courses aren’t really talked about or emphasized. At that point, residency program directors don’t really get much useful information from the fact that you got an “A” or “Honors” in Human Embryology vs. say your MS-3 performance on a General Surgery rotation, for example. For the most part, in the basic science or preclinical part of the curriculum, it was USMLE Step 1 scores that were used as a proxy for your basic science knowledge. And more often than not, USMLE Step 1 was mainly used as a screening tool, in terms of score cutoffs, for different specialties (especially more competitive specialties) when it came to filtering through applications and doling out residency interviews.
Pass/Fail grading during the preclinical years is not something new, in fact many top 5/top 10 med schools had that type of grading and it had no impact on USMLE Step 1 board scores. That trend sort of filtered down to what many other medical schools in lower tiers have now. There’s quite a bit of medical education research in the literature on this topic: A Change to Pass/Fail Grading in the First Two Years at One... : Academic Medicine. Medical students, as a general cohort, are very self-driven, and didn’t need the aspect of a grade to study for USMLE Step 1 which is now Pass/Fail anyways since 2022. This year is the first match year of UMKC BA/MD students with USMLE Step 1 being Pass/Fail.
3) I don’t think there is active UMKC BA/MD bias, certainly not to the extent of “DO stigma” in the residency match, although that too is quickly fading away due to the use of so-called holistic review.
In the past, anecdotally, there have been concerns on the interview trail with our students being so young when we apply for residency as Year 6s (generally 23/24 years old, when one would be normally finishing their 2nd year of med school) in terms of maturity or not having a broad enough educational experience (this came up more in competitive specialties), but that’s not a hard and fast rule.
4) To answer your statement above with regards to evaluation of match lists, one thing I would add is that evaluation of match lists tend to be multifactorial in terms of assessment and evaluation. It’s hard to sometimes evaluate them well as an outsider (especially if you haven’t gone to medical school) and even harder to do as a soon to be graduating high school student, especially if you don’t have physician parents or relatives.
That being said, it’s not entirely fruitless. Residency match lists give you a good idea about overall match rates, about specialty distribution of a particular year’s graduates or trends in specialty distribution if you have several years’ worth of match lists, and the success of students at that particular medical school in being able to match into the more competitive specialties (which can also change, although with some similarities).
You brought up Orthopaedic Surgery for example, which if you look this year at the match list, no one matched into. Does that mean no one this year was interested in Ortho? Doubtful, although it’s possible. I’m working on a thorough analysis of this year’s match list, which hopefully will be posted by Monday on the 1st of April (by putting that in writing here, I hope that will internally motivate me to stick to my word to get it done, especially as it looks like this thread is picking up and students & parents are asking really great questions).
