<p>This spreadsheet has been available on SDN for quite some time, so I thought I'd offer it here as well in case anyone would like a little help with their choice of med schools. It takes a variety of factors (sGPA, cGPA, MCAT scores, research/clinical/volunteer experience, URM status) into account and compares you to the applicant pool at each school. It also has prediction tools to help you get an idea of what you should expect on the MCAT and how many schools to apply to at each level of competitiveness considering your specific stats.</p>
<p>When you click on the link, it will ask if you want to open or save an excel sheet. This is the chart everyone is talking about. I found it on sdn and posted the link location for you guys. Let me know if it doesn’t work.</p>
<p>The only problem I have with this chart is that it uses the values median values for those that are accepted (from the MSAR). US News tells you the average for students who enroll, which is more important in choosing what schools to apply to</p>
<p>What a great spreadsheet! I can totally see how it would be a wonderful tool to use as a starting point. I have a feeling its predictions are reasonable for statistically balanced students with average extracurriculars (a nice mix of clinical and nonclinical, volunteering, leadership, research, etc) and pretty good rec letters because it seems like those 2 areas are the ones that can have significant impact.</p>
<p>If you have a great hook or really unique experiences (your advisors should give you a good idea of if you have one of these or not) or really prestigious awards AND really incredible recommendation letters (if a recommender’s writing you a great one, they’ll likely allude to it), I’d go for broke and apply to the big name schools. It seems like I may have one of those hooks/experiences, and the only schools to “show me some love” besides my state school were listed as “long shots” on that spreadsheet.</p>
<p>On the other hand, no combination of high MCAT and high GPA is going to save an applicant who has no experience and lackluster recommendation letters. If you plan on relying heavily on your stats and haven’t taken the time to get to know people who can really go to bat for you, I would really hesitate to trust all the green you’ll see on that spreadsheet.</p>
<p>If I were doing it all over again, I would apply much more wildly if I had amazing letters and stellar ECs (dream schools, top tens, “might as well apply if I’m only going to go through this once,” those type of schools) and much much more conservatively if I were planning to rely primarily on great stats to get me through compared to the relatively balanced way I actually applied. Disclaimer: that’s just my opinion, based only on my experience and that of my friends who are all going through app process this year, and that strategy might not work for you.</p>
<p>The one you linked to is fine. It’s probably all you’re going to be able to find. The new ones have all been removed from SDN per request of the AAMC as it uses MSAR data. My suspicion is that some of the newer features (such as using acceptance rate data plus other factors to estimate a chance at an interview/acceptance) probably made them uncomfortable so they decided to use the MSAR question of fair-use against the distribution of the spreadsheet. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that that spreadsheet does use old data – at least 2 years as it was created in early 2009.</p>
<p>I will admit you can probably find newer copies by googling the title of this thread. Which version you’ll actually get is anyone’s guess. The final fully-unlocked version was 2.70. Anything after that was locked to try and appease the AAMC (to no avail).</p>
<p>I tried to access that but when making the account on SDN I couldn’t. How do I answer the random question when it asks “3 6 ? 12 15” something like that.</p>
<p>To clarify bluebayou’s statement, you can find me on SDN; however, I do not respond to requests for the spreadsheet. Your best bet is to do a search online, download from the above link or contact people on SDN who state they have it but who were not involved w/ the project itself. I do not personally distribute the spreadsheet under any circumstances. While it was a great project while it lasted, it has been officially removed from SDN (and elsewhere) due to the AAMC feeling it is not fair use. The reality is that it was distributed too widely. Initially, it was more of a simple tool to be used by a small group of people who had the MSAR and simply wanted an easier way of organizing that data. Over time, it ballooned into something different and the AAMC apparently felt threatened. As a result, it is no longer distributed.</p>