<p>Someone on SDN received the new MSAR and was nice enough to create a spreadsheet of the numbers. The basic summary: numbers all went up. The median MCAT score of top tier schools (from Northwestern to Harvard) is now 37. WashU leads as always with a median of 38. The median GPA at practically every med school in the country is 3.7-3.9. The old 3.5/30 matriculant numbers have quickly become outdated. In fact, a 3.5 puts you in the bottom 10% at many med schools (the AAMC has now started to publish 10th and 90th percentiles for GPA and MCAT).</p>
<p>The most popular med schools to apply to (as defined by med schools receiving 10,000 or more applications) are: George Washington, NYMC, Drexel, Boston University, and Georgetown.</p>
<p>Oh and these numbers are for the last application cycle. Word on the street is that applications are up another 10-15% for the current application cycle (the one I'm in) so it'll be interesting to see what kind of numbers appear in the MSAR next year.</p>
<p>not sure if a link to another forum is kosher here but the thread is called "New MSAR out" in the allopatheic section...its hard to miss....don't forget to thank the guy who posted it, truly awesome</p>
<p>25 schools with median MCAT of 35+ and 42 with median science GPA of 3.8 plus, yikes</p>
<p>and here's a fun one: 82 schools where the 90th percentile GPA is a 4.0</p>
<p>and another: 32 schools where the 90th percentile MCAT is a 40+</p>
<p>oh, the joys of spreadsheets</p>
<p>it is always important to note with MSAR data though that they used the numbers for admitted applicants rather than matriculants, so the numbers of people who actually go to most of the schools will be a little lower.</p>
<p>As NCG has pointed out to me before, it is very important to remember that the MSAR traditionally uses numbers for admitted student pools, not eventual student bodies. This is why so many schools look so similar -- because they're all admitting the same top students, they just vary in how far down they dip. That doesn't mean that they all end up with 10% 41's.</p>
<p>Okay, so, obviously, if they're looking at accepted students rather than matriculated students, the numbers are a little inflated. I haven't crunched the numbers, but it would seem impossible that 213 people make up the top 10% of all the top medical schools. So while it's scary as hell, it's not reflecting a lot of lower-scoring people who must have ultimately gotten into medical school. Does anyone know if there is any data on waitlist movement and statistics (I realize that that's asking too much).</p>
<p>Edit: After I posted I realized that BDM already said it as I was typing my post. Oops.</p>
<p>To get an idea of how much the discrepancy can be, according to the MSAR, Northwestern had a median MCAT of 37 for accepted students. According to Northwestern's webpage, the average MCAT for the Class of 2011 was 34.2.
We probably expect Northwestern's MEDIAN to be around 35 so we're talking in the neighborhood of 2 pts. I expect this discrepancy to virtually disappear as we move into the top 10.</p>
<p>As side note, so far we've been simply adding up the medians of individual subsections in order to get an overall score. If you simply take a median of the overall scores, you'd probably get a lower number than the composite median that we're using now.</p>
<p>If we include people scoring 40 or above (~99.5th percentile), we'd get around 350 people. </p>
<p>How many students matriculate at a Top 20 med school in any given year? Probably around 3500 (avg. of 175 students per school). So, you CAN theoretically fill each Top 20 med school with 10% of 40+ scorers. Obviously, we barely have enough to go around and you'd have to assume these 40+ scorers are evenly distributed among the top schools and that none of them will matriculate at a non-top school. Now, Philly is saying that 32 schools are actually claiming 40 as their 90th percentile MCAT score. This is obviously due to the fact most of these 40+ scorers probably got multiple acceptances to Top 30 schools.</p>
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If you simply take a median of the overall scores, you'd probably get a lower number than the composite median that we're using now.
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<p>That makes sense. Everyone's got a best subject. Even if people who tend to do very, very well in one subject are more likely to do well in the others (as I suspect is at least somewhat true), you're right that isn't not going to be a perfectly linear correlation.</p>
<p>Actually, I think most of the top 20 schools are much smaller than 175. The national average medical school is around 150, isn't it? And the top schools are disproportionally small ones, if memory serves.</p>
<p>what seems surprising to me from looking at this MSAR spreadsheet is that the "top" schools dont get nearly as many applications as the other schools....this seems in stark contrast to undergrad admissions where everyone and their mother applies to ivy league schools and hope for the best.</p>
<p>Yes, the applicant pool at top schools is much more self-selective. The application fees are also more (~$110 to apply to each med school) and you have to write essays and such so no one's going to waste their time applying to a school they have no shot at.</p>
<p>If I did it right , never a sure thing when it comes to my old eyes, Baylor, JHU, Stanford,Vandy, Penn, Case, Columbia, NYU, Chicago,Yale, and Duke all have 10/90's of accepted students of 29/41 (maybe Cornell, too). Emory and USC are 29/40, and Mayo and UCSF seem to maybe have a more active affirmative action program at 27/41, UMich for understandable reason seems more numbers focused at 30/41 and then of course....WashU. "Quien es mas macho? Fernando Llamas o WashU? Wash U es mas macho." 32/42. Sheesh.</p>