<p>Do med schools do this as well as when some undergraduate institutes do this when selecting their students?</p>
<p>Absolutely. Medical schools are HUGE proponents of affirmative action.</p>
<p>Then when will people who only got in because of their race be weeded out? I know there are URMs who are genuinely smart, but there are cases of URMs with mediocre scores going to medical school.</p>
<p>I don't understand how they can let this happen and possibly jeopardize the lives of patients and possibly cause medical malpractice costs to skyrocket.</p>
<p>I wish med schools would only consider merit so as to minimize POSSIBLE errors. Not hat URMs with lower stats are bad doctors, but there is probably a good correlation between the strength of a med school applicant with their performance as a doctor.</p>
<p>I guess that's what the board exams are for.</p>
<p>By my estimation, ceteris paribus, race can be equivalent to ten points on the MCAT.</p>
<p>There are more people who who can become qualified doctors than there are medical school spots. Both ORMs and URMs graduate medical school at over 90% rate despite URMs having much lower MCAT/GPA scores on average.</p>
<p>Patients have indicated that they trust doctors of the same race more and are more likely to follow their orders. Minorities have also indicated that they are more likely to serve in undeserved areas. Thus, the point of affirmative action is to increase the proportion of minority doctors so as to reach out to groups that have traditionally lacked adequate access to healthcare.</p>
<p>You make a good point norcalguy.</p>
<p>My sister (not Black) interviewed at certain HBCU med school and they asked her if she ever helped underprivileged communities.</p>
<p>"By my estimation, ceteris paribus, race can be equivalent to ten points on the MCAT."</p>
<p>That's an ignorant statement unless you you have the evidence to back it up.</p>
<p>Well, it's an estimation rather than a firm statement of belief, which I thought I made clear. And in any case it's usually possible to request a citation without using insults.</p>
<hr>
<p>You can see here that when the science GPA of matriculants is compared from race to race, the highest available science GPA is 3.62 or 3.6, while the lowest is 3.25, for a difference of 0.35.</p>
<p>When the overall MCAT score is compared from race to race, the highest available MCAT score is 31.5, while the lowest is 23.9, a difference of 7.6. Of course, I've had to switch the racial groups to make this comparison, which I'll remedy in just a moment.</p>
<p>Assumptions are necessary, which is why this is not a rigorous analysis. </p>
<p>Notice I've had to assume that the most basic goal is to get into medical school. Since these data don't speak to the distribution of which students are going to which medical schools, it's very hard to speak to that. In addition, there may be some selection effects -- do some races disproportionately refuse to apply to schools outside of USN's top ten? -- so this analysis is certainly, certainly not rigorous.</p>
<p>Using the race with the highest MCAT score as the benchmark, then, we can see two examples:
Group 1 has a BCPM that's .21 lower, an overall that's .08 lower, and an MCAT score that's 7.6 lower.
Group 2 has a BCPM that's .35 lower, an overall that's .17 lower, and an MCAT score that's 6.2 lower.</p>
<p>You can combine these scores however you like to generate a ceteris paribus estimation of what the MCAT scores would look like. My personal preference -- yet another assumption I've had to make -- is that one tenth of a GPA point is worth about the same as an MCAT point. (In other words, that the MCAT is worth about the same as the GPA. Some have suggested more extreme ratios, which would substantially inflate the numbers I conclude with.)</p>
<p>If you choose to use the weighting discussed above, you see two gaps that are both worth about 9.7 points on standardized testing.</p>
<p>In any case, those are the gaps you see among matriculated medical students. What they tell us about admissions is difficult, but at the very least these are the differences in matriculations.</p>