<p>Also… my guy would have had a really good shot at an auto-admit to Hershey had he chosen either of those schools. Some kids from our school with lesser “stats” have gotten them. The minimum to apply at York is a 29 ACT or 1310 SAT. </p>
<p>Some do prefer that route. Others do not. Mine did not. He could, of course, regret that later, but I doubt it. ;)</p>
<p>If I had the money and my DD could get into any UG school or medical school, I would advise her to go to the best fit. The one she would be happiest and the one where she feels she can maintain her favorite hobbies. Going through the medical training is hell folks and I understand you want your child in the best environment for success. But they have to enjoy the moment. I get to see a lot of high strung physicians who are not very happy or pleasant characters. I seriously want my daughter to emulate those providers who are modest, happy, and hold true to the oath of the profession. It isn’t all about prestige. Physicians do not pick their personal doctors according to the prestige of their UG, SOM or residency. It is literally word of mouth. And the best providers aren’t typically from the prestigious institutions.</p>
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<p>I’m with you…</p>
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<p>UCSF is highly ranked, yes, but has a relatively low MCAT score. Indeed, outside of U-Dub, which is focused on instaters and some neighboring residents, UCSF has the lowest MCAT of the top 15, and tied with/lower than some ranked 15-20.</p>
<p>Even at the undergrad level, UC focuses more on GPA than test scores. For example, </p>
<p>Stanford and Yale are both 3.79.</p>
<p>UCSF is 3.77.</p>
<p>I heard UCLA med school is the “happy” med school on the west coast. Does UCSF have the similar reputation (i.e., being a “happy” med school)? Somehow DS has a good impression about UCSF because his friend goes there. However he heard that the research money is less available for med school students there – so I think it has a different focus as compared to, say, Stanford med school.</p>
<p>California public schools generally do not like to rely too much on standardized tests to evaluate students (relatively speaking), as I heard.</p>
<p>Maintaining favorite hobbies seem to be more difficult in med school than in college, as med school students spend well too much time on studying in general. When we asked DS what most of his peer students do, he said most of them curl up in the library studying most of the time. If a student wants to spend more time on hobbies, college is the right time to do so, not in med school.</p>
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Don’t get me wrong. I love UA as much as anybody, but it ain’t no pool full of kids with 29-36 ACT scores for sure.</p>
<p>Back in the day, UA was perceived as academically inferior to even their in-state arch rival Auburn. They did increase their academic profile quite a bit off late, thanks to a large extent, the extraordinary success of their football team. What coach Saban does for UA beyond football is kind of what coach K does for Duke. All the idiots who complain about the size of Saban’s pay check don’t comprehend the enormity of his impact.</p>
<p>Their USNWR rankings gone shooting up. Their enhanced name recognition has increased OOS enrolment a lot these days. Alabama has been consistently recruiting for talented kids in the North East. My kids get letters from UA to attend recruitment events at NYC.</p>
<p>^^^ To stick up for UA just a tad, they have 27% > 30 ACT and 12 - 15% > 700, so it’s not a bad stat, though not comparative to top schools. They’ve improved their stats a ton by their generous merit aid offerings. Good money will often draw kids in - esp when marketed well (as they do).</p>
<p>However, due to the competition they bring in, it’s not a school I’d recommend for pre-med for someone who doesn’t have those top stats as they’d be less likely to succeed there than, say, at York (or equivalent). M2CK is correct in saying that many of those high stat students will be gunning for the grades in the pre-req classes (or engineering). Someone a bit less naturally talented could have trouble.</p>
<p>Whether their top stat kids could do well in a school where > 50% have top stats and ability would remain to be seen - just as it does for kids who do choose to attend those schools. No one knows the hypothetical answers. Some kids do well when they are the top dog among a few. Others do well when challenged by several peers. Some could do well in either situation.</p>
<p>Mcat2, all of my friends in med school maintained a hobby. Some played golf, one had a band, I played plenty of racquetball, and had one guy who taught an MCAT class. You are right, there is more time to do so in college. In fact, way more time. But I would highly recommend that every med student should maintain 1-2 hobbies during their schooling. We had one of our classmates commit suicide in residency. It was a difficult news knowing he had an envious past (full ride in UG and SOM) and a bright future. Please balance your life!</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong. I love UA as much as anybody, but it ain’t no pool full of kids with 29-36 ACT scores for sure.</p>
<p>You misunderstand. I’m not talking about the school at large. A premed student isn’t likely in a major that has lowish stats kids. Altho premeds can be any major, they tend to be Bio, Chem, Eng’g, or some other challenging major. The stats of the kids in THOSE majors are the cream of the crop.</p>
<p>If you had read my entire quote, you’d have seen that I wasn’t talking about the school at large…</p>
<p>*big fish in an untalented pond ??? What the heck? You’re calling a pond filled with kids with ACT scores of 29-36 “untalented”? You are incredibly naive. Those are top 7% of students. Those are the STEM/premed students at the “other” schools. I have news for you…when (and IF) your hiney ever ends up in a med school, your classmates will be from that same pool.<a href=“NOTE:%20%20Top%207%%20of%20students%20nationally”>/I</a></p>
<p>My son was a ChemE premed. What do you think the stats were of his classmates? They were nearly all high stats kids.</p>
<p>High stats kids aren’t equally spread out amongst all of a college’s majors. They tend to be largely concentrated in about 12 majors. </p>
<p>As Creekland points out, 27% of Bama’s students have an ACT 30+… Where do you think those kids are largely found???</p>
<p>frugaldoctor, I agree with you that students should balance their lives. But DS noticed that there are more “talented” (not in academic I refer to here) students in college than in med school – one apparent reason is that there are at least ten times more students at his college than at his med school. He played in bands frequently as an UG students; but his band parteners are no longer near where he is now - I think he missed those UG years. (To be sure, DS went to a college which is rumored to be more “arty” than many other colleges.)</p>
<p>One doctor DS was seeing in college told him that he would mostly likely feel that he does not study enough before a test as a premed, and he should tell himself that most students on the premed track would likely think in this way so he should not worry too much about it. I think he followed his suggestion while in college.</p>
<p>As a med school student, even before the STEP-1 test, I do not think he would have studied more than most of his peers at his med school (and maybe those at many other med schools as well.) He would never study 12-13 hours per day like some of the over-achieving students at his med school do. (one girl was rumored to always study 13 hours every day, even before the STEP-1 preparation time comes. Maybe Derm is her ultimate goal?)</p>
<p>I looked up some STEP-1 and MCAT statistics, it appears that although DS was among the top 800-900 MCAT takers who applied to med school in his application year, he was likely among the top 2000-2200 STEP-1 takers in the year he took the STEP-1 test, I think. He seems to be better at MCAT test (which is more an “aptitude” test like SAT which requires less preparation?) than STEP-1 which is more an achievement test which requires tons of study, I think.</p>
<p>(Continued) Hmmm…Just another thought: In terms of STEP-1 scores, I wonder what is his percentile among all students in the same class at his med school (assuming that he is at the low end of the top 2100 scorers nationalwide)? Belong to the top 25% at his school (which is a top-10 one in the US N&R research rank)?</p>
<p>Step 1 is definitely a much more knowledge/memory based test than the MCAT and in my opinion generally more straight forward than the MCAT. Interestingly I scored basically the same percentile relative to med school matriculants (not applicants which would be a weaker pool than step 1 takers) on the MCAT as I did on Step 1.</p>
<p>In your educated guess, for STEP-1 scores, do you think your percentile within your class is significantly lower than your percentile nationalwide? Somehow I think in DS’s case, it may be almost 20% lower (say, 94% nationalwide vs 75% among his classmates in the same school/year.)</p>
<p>It is easier to dig out national statistics in the public domain; however, it is not easy to know the statistics (not only the average, but also the detailed distribution) of your own med school. It is not that useful to have the mean and SD only, if it is not a normal distribution.</p>
<p>Unlike you, DS’s percentile on STEP-1 is lower than that on his MCAT.</p>
<p>D’s class few weeks ago had average score 242 which is higher than national average. It could have changed since more people took it. D. score significantly higher than predicted based on correlation to the MCAT.<br>
I believe that her SOM shorter pre-clinical program is the reason for the higher Step 1 scores. They are done with pre-clinicals in March of the second year which allow them to officially take one rotation period for Step 1 preparation. Specifically, D. has spent 7.5 weeks (longer than most others, average I believe is 6 weeks), 14 hours every day (she scheduled break days when she did not study at all) preparing and her plan has worked wonderfully for her.<br>
Do not get me wrong, Step 1 is soo much harder than the MCAT, there is no comparison whatsoever.</p>
<p>242 as the class aberage is high. How to predict a perso’s STEP-1 score based on her MCAT score though? According to this post on SDN, 242 is about 82 in percentile, Somehow I do not think the percentile of the MCAT class average at your school would be 82 though. My point is it is likely harder to achive rhe same percentile on STEP-1 than on MCAT as the pool of test takers on STEP-1 are stronger. Some individual may get the same percentile on STEP-1 and on MCAT. But it is unlikely so for a class at a med school!</p>
<p>"Quote:
Originally Posted by Medicine16<br>
Percentiles?
For those who don’t feel like calculating the percentiles on their own, I made a list. As a heads up, these percentiles are for each range – given the way the data is broken down, you can’t break it down within a certain range of scores (without assuming the data is normal, which it isn’t). Practically speaking, this means that each percentile is actually for the lowest score in that range.</p>
<p>260+ – 97.9
251-260 – 92.0
241-250 – 81.6
231-240 – 67.2
221-230 – 51.4
211-220 – 36.5
201-210 – 21.9
191-200 – 8.7
181-190 – 0.92</p>
<p>Also, I’m not the greatest at stats, so if someone sees a problem with my numbers definitely let me know."</p>
<p>I think i would like to illustrate the difficulfy to obtaining a score on STEP-1 that is high in percentile,</p>
<p>Quite a many MCAT teat takers axhieve, say, 98, in percentile. It is top 2% of all test takers.</p>
<p>There may be 28000 (+/- 1000?) STEP 1 test takers. The top 2% of 28000 are only 560 people. Suppose they are evenly distributed on 20 med schools which score the highest (unreallistic case). Each med school may have only 560/20=28 students who are in the top 2%. But the class size at many schools is 150. So 122 STEP-1 teat takers can not possibly be in the pool of the top 2 % (top 560 test takers nationally.)0</p>
<p>D. mentioned that their is a predictor for the Step 1 score based on the MCAT score. But I do not have a link. She used it while waiting for her score, but then she said that her Step 1 score would correspond to a higher MCAT than her MCAT score. She and I strongly believe that her SOM shorter pre-clinical preogram is pushing their Step 1 scores higher. She considered the program when choosing her SOM, apparently, they stress it on various info sessions, particularly during Second Look event</p>
<p>BCM does the same (1.5 preclinical year), and in some years (esp. when it still had Anderson’s research money and was a top 10), it boasted an 242 class average as well. UTSW students, as rivals to BCM students, “teased” them by saying that the students at BCM spend much more time in preparing the test but not score much higher than UTSW Students. To be sure, BCM recruits somewhat more OOS students whose stats (esp, MCAT - as it is not easy to beat the GPA of some premed students at some public schools in TEXAS. One school could produce dozens of 4.0 here, which was unheard of at DS’s college.)</p>
<p>MiamiDAP, I believe that, although the curriculum helps the STEP-1 score at your d’s school, the percentage of OOS students may help too (esp. those from California, i think.)</p>
<p>But i heard several med schools in mid west (wustl) recruits many good test takers in the heart land of America. So they may have a high class average too as long as they give their students sufficient time to prep for this test. I heard wustl may give their students shorter prep time though.</p>
<p>My percentile within my class is definitely lower (and within my MD/PhD program, even lower since the MD/PhD average is higher than the MD average). I am well above the national average, solidly above my schools average, and barely above my MD/PhD program’s average.</p>