Applying to Medical School - Page 5
to the committee, either indirectly through
their application or directly at their inter-
views, all the strengths they possess. Having
solid credentials and being able to market
yourself as a prospective good physician make up
the winning combination that will
open the door to a place in a freshman medical
school class.
Some selection factors, such as GPA or MCAT
scores, can readily be put into quan-
titative terms, while others, such as
personality or motivation, cannot. Nevertheless,
both types of factors are important and have a
strong bearing on the outcome of the
admissions process. Specifically, they
determine if you qualify to be placed at some point
into the applicant interview pool and at a
later time into the applicant acceptance pool.
Academic Achievement
Academic achievement is measured in terms of
your grade point average, science course
performance, and college(s)
attended.
Grade Point Average (GPA)
The application that each medical school
receives on behalf of an individual applicant
will contain a facsimile of the candidate's
college transcript and, where applicable, any
postgraduate record. It will show the courses
taken and grades received during the regu-
lar academic year as well as during any summer.
(Those high school courses and grades
for which advanced placement credit were given
are also listed.) Courses that the appli-
cant is taking or is planning to take are also
frequently requested. This self-designed
record is checked for accuracy against official
transcripts sent by your school and will
form the basis of your GPA.
Recently, with the competition for places in
entering classes intense because of the
large number of applicants, the GPA for the
average matriculant was 3.5. This can be
interpreted to mean that a significant number
of the approximately 16,000 students
accepted--which represents only 35% of the
applicant pool--had an average below 3.5.
On the other hand, the entire pool average was
3.3. This indicates that some applicants
with 3.5 or higher failed to gain admission,
thus emphasizing that a high GPA by itself
does not guarantee acceptance into medical
school. The corollary is also true, namely,
that having an average below 3.3 also does not
mean you will not be accepted. As a mat-
ter of fact, 5% of those accepted had averages
of 3.0 or less. All this suggests that your
chances will be markedly diminished if your
average goes below 3.3. The lower the
GPA, the greater the need to compensate for
this weakness by high MCAT scores and
recommendations. Also, achieving improved
grades in the later years of college, espe-
cially in the sciences, will contribute to a
more favorable reception of your application.
All this emphasizes the fact that you should
not view the GPA as an entity in itself; rather,
it has to be taken along with all other
considerations, and a low GPA by itself should not
discourage you from applying. Therefore, the
quantitative factors will remain a very
vital, and for most applicants, a critical
element of the selection process. You should
strive to attain as high a level of achievement
as possible. This is essential because pass-
ing the initial admissions screening is usually
dependent on your academic achievement.
While the GPA is one of the major factors
examined as part of the initial screening
process, it is usually viewed in the context of
the applicant's overall educational data.
The reasons are that the GPA is subject to
grade inflation, is relative to the college
attended and the course of studies pursued, and
only represents an overall level of per-
formance rather than the direction of the
performance.
Medical school admissions officers know that
grade inflation--namely, artificially
high grades that do not accurately reflect the
level of academic achievement--is a com-
mon phenomenon of undergraduate education.
Thus, while they do not minimize the
value of a high GPA, they do not necessarily
take it at face value. Admissions officers
seek to establish how authentic the GPA is by
checking to see at which college the
grades were earned. Therefore, an applicant
with a good GPA attending a college with
low admission selection standards will not be
much better off than another applicant
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