Regarding residency match to rank Medical School quality, here is comment from a respected OP @WayOutWestMom
You can’t judge a medical school by its Match List. You might as well try to read tea leaves. A school’s match list is reflective of the interests of a particular set of students, not the quality of education a school receives.
Choice of speciality is also highly personal and may vary wildly from one year to the next at the same program.
It is not a true indication of anything except a snapshot of preferences of a particular set of students.
I would heavily advise against signing that commitment letter.
You never know if such a letter could be legally binding, and you don’t want to find out the hard way.
Typically, forcing an acceptee to commit to a school in such a short manner is a sign that the school is either very desperate to maintain yield or desperate for more money. The only other program I know of that forces accepted students to commit within a short time is California Northstate (which is one of the worst medical schools I know of).
Thus, I really would not advising going to this program- it’s a really poor and embarrassing image that they’re desperate enough to try to force students to commit before they receive all their other program options.
@grtd2010
In my view - If you take a 3 year trend / average and get similar percentages on the residency matches, it is a better proxy than US News rankings.
Like all rankings or relative ratings, it is one method.
You have given me an idea - I should do a correlation on the relative ranking using residency match approach with US News ranking.
Again, folks can draw their own conclusions using data or methodology they are comfortable with.
@MaMaTEN Irrespective of school reputation, if anything is binding in nature its a big red flag in a sense why school wants to restrict students’ options/choices just to fill their class?
On a related note of rankings, proxies etc, this is an article posted by a competing site Poets and Quants on the US news’ general methodologies. I personally believe their flaws in ranking medical schools are even more magnified. (In last year’s thread I shared the scathing criticism of that agency by former dean of admissions at Yale).
Of course, one can argue that a competing site’s folks have every reason to point out only the flaws, but then they must be studying and analyzing the methodologies deeper more than a layman or his student can afford to spend time and resources on.
If this was not an Early Decision scenario, the college is behaving “unfairly” - that is what we all feel because of “unwritten” rules and “conventional” wisdom of the admissions process.
Since the school is doing something “unconventional”, I would take a pure legalistic view of things and focus only on the official written acceptance letter and their terms. (Again I am NOT a lawyer).
Having said that, I would call the admissions office and ask for additional time (till May 1) to consider the acceptance offer. During this conversation, you may better understand their motivation for taking such an unconventional step.
@rk2017
I agree US News is flawed as it uses research dollars as ONE big factor.
I am personally uncomfortable with absolute research dollars driving your ranking up or down.
The US News ranking changes if you ignore the impact of research dollars.
@DSOF20192023 if a school can’t manage admission process smooth then think twice what to expect from its actual education? I am a firm believer in processes and when one deal with real life scenarios those bottlenecks are eye popping and one should dig deeper. Still curious to learn from @MaMaTEN about actual details (as said the devil is in detail).
To put a contrast to new medical school, search online for Carle Medical school that U of I started last year and U of I has stellar reputation for engineering, what they did, offered an entire class of 34 a free tuition, yes medical school free tuition and to my knowledge only one BioE UG from entire UIUC was able to make a cut into that program.
@MaMaTEN…if the school is CNU then do not sign anything, we have been pestered by CNU to join their 6 yrs med school even after we told we will not come, they keep emailing us deadlines to pay $100 and reserve the seat and sign and send some papers that we did not do. They even called my son on his cellphone twice to enroll we said no…
Another big flaw in usnews methodology is their weightage given to perception. I think somewhere around the beginning of this thread I shared the extract from the writing of one of the longest serving deans of a prestigious med school, where he said, he has no way of rating more than a handful of other medical schools that are immediate competitors. Similar views reiterated in the Forbes article I just shared few posts back.
Agree with sentiment that student class from year over year may have different interests and therefore may apply to different residencies and specialties.
Trying to play devil’s advocate role here. However in order to apply successfully to those different residencies/specialties one should have receive that education, research and other opportunities in that medical school. so medical school education is still important, e.g. UMKC doesn’t even offer certain specialties (or something like that) as they don’t even have any framework/expertise setup for that in medical school.