<p>Of course both scores are used in the application. But the question is about which one is more important.</p>
<p>I think GPA is more important, because you cannot raise GPA easily and it reflects the overall quality of an applicant where as MCAT can be studied and it could be a hit and miss. </p>
<p>I feel it in my D's application this cycle. She had a 3.5 GPA and a 33 MCAT and she got in some DO schools, while her MCAT is way above the DO schools ~27-28, her gpa is in par with the overall DO schools average.</p>
<p>First, congrats to your D. for getting in some DO schools. I have met few DOs and my D. has deal with one DO (for her Research project) while at Med. School. I do not know what is a difference at the beginning of the career. The process is much more difficult for the very competitive specialties, like Derm. Other than this (of course, I do not know much, I just can use mine and my D’s experiences), I am not aware of any difference later on, the same positions, going to the same conferences, working with the same type of patients at some very known palces, and as all of these is the same, I assume that the compensation is also the same.
Now in regard to your question and again, basically from what I have been reading here on CC, this year has been more competitive, seems much more than during D’s application cycle. I woudl say, that according to my perception (without any kind of gathering additional info, strictly from the intuition) GPA=3.5 is lower than MCAT=33 . Again, I believe that if your D. was applying during my D’s application cycle (D. is MS4), than your D. probably would have got in into some Med. Schools. Few years ago 33 was not bad at all, but 3.5 would still be on a lower side. For comparison, my D had 3.98/35 and she applied to 8 schools, no DO’s. She got into 4 (and could have gotten into couple more, but she withdrew from the ones that put her on hold). Out of 4 acceptances, 2 were top 20. And adcom of one (her current school) called her pre-med advisor and apologize that they cannot offer Merit award and they still hope that she wiil choose them (and she did). I am saying all of that to let you know that my D’s application cycle seem to be somewhat less competitive than current one.
So, keep that in mind. People will give you answers based on personal experiences, and they depend on the competitiveness of specific application cycle.
Again, congrats! I would be very proud!!</p>
<p>@artloversplus I believe it depends on the school. </p>
<p>You should check the emphasis placed based on the LizzyM spreadsheet. It normally tells you whether one of the attributes way off for a specific school when you plug in the numbers.</p>
<p>LizzyM’s formula is gpa x 10+ MCAT -1
Do you think that -1 is referring to MCAT or the GPA?
-It does not matter as far as formula goes, mathematically, 3.5x10+33-1= 67. I never understood the value of this formula, all that it does is combining GPA and MCAT. But I believe that schools look at them separately any way. I do not know.<br>
I am pretty sure that I knew several cases that got into Med. School with MCAT=33 or even 31 during my D. cycle.
I would still focus on the fact that your D. got in, and it is still an amazing accomplishment.</p>
<p>@artloverplus - I believe GPA is more important than MCAT for two reasons. First it is easier to repair MCAT than GPA. E.g. raising a 3.3 GPA to 3.7 is way more difficult than raising mcat score from say 33 to 37. </p>
<p>Second, for a given LizzyM score, higher the gpa better the probability of admission as per MSAR chart. E.g. for a lizzym score of 70, chances of admission is higher for 3.7 gpa + 33 mcat vs 3.3 gpa + 37 mcat</p>
<p>So the first priority is to get the highest possible gpa, then prepare for your target mcat score. If it means taking gap years, you will still be on track to join medical school.</p>
<p>GPAs offer insight into past performance, MCAT future potential at least as far as standardized exams. As such IMO I think GPAs/MCATs carry pretty much equal weight as together they provide an arguably objective assessment as to whether an applicant can cut it academically in med school and on standardized exams both of which would be very important initially to adcoms. Sadly there are many more applicants who can cut it in every application cycle (apparently more this year) than there are seats available and adcoms have to make choices. Assuming one gets past initial assessment, then the black hole of utterly subjective components (secondaries, PS, ECs, LORs) come into play along with things like school’s mission statement, fit, diversity (i.e not having a class of all bio majors) etc in deciding whether to offer IIs, making for increasingly more difficult choices for adcoms among applicants who can cut it. </p>
<p>I’ve been a med school faculty member for >15 years. I’ve been an adcom for >10 yrs. For reasons related to privacy, I don’t disclose my location.</p>
<p>My school does not use the LizzyM score. I came up with that myself a few years ago as a quick and dirty way to target one’s applications to increase the likelihood of being invited for interviews. Here at SDN, I saw too many people who had too many reach schools and too few schools were a good match with their academic acheivement. </p>
<p>More than gpa and MCAT goes into the decision to issue an interview invitation which is why I call this “quick & dirty”. Decisions to make offers of admission are based on far more than gpa & MCAT and I don’t think one can use LizzyM score to predict offers of admission.</p>
<p>Even creator of Lizzym formula indicates that it is of very limited use.</p>
<p>^^ @texaspg You have not put into consideration of IS vs OOS and URM vs ORM, for example Howard, morehouse and Meharry how many ORM or white are admitted with 3.5? and to get into Uniform, you need to be committed to military…</p>
<p>@jagulator20
Without reference to your school, can you disclose your “quick and dirty” formula that is not LizzyM? This will benefit the future applicants. We all understand the subjective phase of the selection, but without knowing the applicant and comparison, on the net, you really cannot make any suggestions. For example, if the applicant self report he has a GOOD LOR, how can we judge that from the face value and the competitiveness. The only thing we can see are the two or three subjective scores.</p>
<p>MDP, you are absolutely right, this year and for the last 4 or 5 years, it is more difficult to apply for medical schools, even for DO schools. My statement is not based on feelings, but the hard facts from various charts.</p>
<p>That is an entirely different issue right? The pickings are slim based on the GPA alone but it gets worse when residency is considered and the fact that 3 of them are tied to historically black colleges.</p>
<p>So it is quite unfortunate to have a GPA below 3.6 and a California residency when applying for MD schools.</p>
<p>Yes, my D’s application is still pending with Davis. But she got rejected from Irving and Riverside. We are still hoping…That is all we can do… </p>
<p>The most damaging thing I think is that she did not app;y to Vtech and Franklin, as I told her to do… Oh well.</p>
<p>If you want to do some reading on the topic, a quick & dirty PubMed search yielded about 3 pages of results on the predictive factors for passing the USMLE Step 1 or COMLEX Level 1 on the first attempt. (Passing USMLE or COMLEX as a proxy for being successful in medical school)</p>
<p>While many of the articles are behind paywalls (I.e. you need a subscription to access them), there are a few which are free. Additionally the abstracts of almost all of the articles are available for free on PubMed.</p>
<p>Basically the consensus seems to be both the MCAT (esp Biological Sciences subscore) and undergrad sGPA offer good predictive value for an applicants eventual success in med school. </p>
<p>~~~~</p>
<p>BTW, I fully agree with Jugulator’s assessment. MCAT + GPA are both important, but once an applicant makes it thru the initial screening, then other factors (mission-match, essays, PS, ECs, LORs, etc) become much more important that stats when it comes to tendering IIs. </p>
<p>I made the same mistake as artloversplus in interpreting jugualator’s post 6 as referring to themselves personally but it seems to be cut and paste from SDN of something LizzM said back in 2009.</p>
<p>The score by itself is just a random number but many of the schools are publishing these averages on their own websites which tells us the GPAs, breakdowns of scores etc. What the spreadsheet gives us is the compilation of stats from all schools in one place which makes it easier for a person to see which schools reflect their personal stats.</p>
<p>Since these numbers are averages of breakdowns for each school, we have to assume some stats might be more meaningless than others since we should get better numbers telling us the 25 and 75%iles of each stat to make it more meaningful rather than averages.</p>
<p>I am rather confused by wowmom’s post 13 as much as the fact that there is a huge disparity between MD and DO admission requirements. If the MCAT and GPA are a reflection of how successful they will be in med school, how are the DO schools able to churn out so many doctors while accepting people in 3.3/27 range?</p>
<p>If you look at the research listed below, you’ll see that a MCAT score 26 is generally the floor for having a high chance (>85%) of passing the USMLE/COMLEX on the first attempt. </p>
<p>References–
Julian ER. Validity of the Medical College Admission Test for predicting medical school performance. Acad Med 2005;80(10):910-7.
Koenig JA, Sireci SG, Wiley A. Evaluating the predictive valid- ity of MCAT scores across diverse applicant groups. Acad Med 1998;73(10):1095-106.
Kleshinski J, Khuder SA, Shapiro JI, Gold JP. Impact of preadmission variables on USMLE step 1 and step 2 performance. Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract 2007;Nov 7.
Family Medicine
Donnon T, Paolucci EO, Violato C. The predictive validity of the MCAT for medical school performance and medical board licensing examinations: a meta-analysis of the published research. Acad Med 2007;82(1):100-6.</p>
<p>(BTW, the mean GPA for a matriculated DO student for 2013 was 3.45 ( SD=.31). If you include post-bacc grade remediation then the mean GPA for matriculating DOs was even higher.)</p>
<p>wowmom - Are there are any more recent studies of this correlationship since there have been lot more DO seats added in the recent past? Am I correct in concluding that 26 is good enough to make someone get through medicine?</p>
<p>I am ambivalent about a GPA relationship although many schools put a lot of weight on it. I am really not certain all GPAs are equal when compared across so many colleges since it is easier to have higher GPAs graduating from some colleges vs others, some majors versus others and so on. It might be true that a high GPA in most cases involves a certain work ethic.</p>
<p>Yes, there are new studies, some published as recently as 2014.</p>
<p>There’s a AAMC guide that has some charts showing the likelihood of completing med school in 4 years and in 5 years based upon GPA and MCAT score.</p>
<p>Unfortunately these data are for allopathic medical schools only. </p>
<p>However, if it makes you feel any more confident in the newer DO schools, the national accreditation body for graduate medical education will not continue to accredit any school (allopathic or osteopathic) if the graduation rate falls below ~90% of entering students. IOW, schools are vested in seeing their students successfully complete med school (which includes passing multiple national standardized exams–USMLE/COMLEX, OSCE and specialty shelf exams)–their existence depends on it. </p>
<p>There is at least one study I saw in PubMed about whether assigning a “weighting” to college GPAs made a difference:</p>
<p>Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract. 2006 May;11(2):145-53.
Investigating the utility of a GPA institutional adjustment index.
Didier T, Kreiter CD, Buri R, Solow C.</p>
<p>From the abstract:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The article is behind a paywall and I’m not giving Springer $40. Feel free to buy it if you want to read it.</p>
<p>~~~</p>
<p>The reason schools are putting a premium of GPA right now is because they can. Law of supply & demand. The number of med school applicants is approaching a historical high. (Although not quite so so high yet as the 1996-97 peak years when there were an even larger number of applicants than there are today vying for even fewer seats.) Also, you can blame US News for escalating the GPA game since it uses the stats of incoming students as a primary metric for assigning rankings to med schools.</p>
<p>I too think that whether MCAT or GPA matters more would depend on the school. From what D could tell, some schools had a strict formula for II and even admissions, some were a bit more nebulous in how they judged. D had a GPA > 3.5, but took the MCAT 3 times for a final score in very low 30s. Because her school is known for grade deflation, and has +s and -s (Ds A-s were a 3.67, and would have been a 4.0 at our state schools) an admissions rep from one of the med schools she applied to told students at her school they add .5 to their GPA when looking at their apps. </p>