Comment by Plasmoid
7 hours ago
Because there are so many applicants that have good grades.
A more cynical view is that the governing boards want a way to pick and choose who they let in. So they create "holistic" application systems to get "360 degree view of the candidate".
No matter how many have good grades, you can always pick the top n by grades—unless there's a ceiling that the top m > n have all hit. Which, if you're talking about "grades" as in GPA, is plausible.
MCAT seems more relevant, though. According to Claude: "Roughly 0.1% or fewer of test-takers score a perfect 528 in any given year — typically only a few dozen individuals out of the ~120,000 or so who sit for the exam annually." So it should work fairly well for them to sort by MCAT and take however many they have (or expect to have) room for.
> No matter how many have good grades, you can always pick the top n by grades. Which, if you're talking about "grades" as in GPA, is plausible.
I live in Ontario and we're there. 40% of Waterloo students had above a 95% average in high school. The average GPA to get into UofT med school is 3.94/4.00 GPA.
What has happened as a result is students killing themselves and each other. If you fail one test in any course, you cannot move to the next level.
So, if you go on the UofT subreddit there's endless stories of pre-med students sabotaging each other. Faking friendliness, destroying notes, etc etc. This is arguably rational because the pool is small and there's little to gain by studying harder if you already have a perfect GPA.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UofT/comments/1sbu811/had_no_idea_t...
You don't want this type of person as a doctor. They will sabotage others because that is how they got ahead in the past. In a medical environment that kills people.
Better to have implicit classism past a certain point. Once the application pool gets too competitive, you will only get amoral psychopaths.
I think OP's point was that the governing boards don't want the people with the top n grades. They want certain people, and by making the admissions criteria fuzzy, they can pick and choose those certain people and then say "well, our admission criteria is subjective," and "we are looking for 'well rounded people," and all kinds of other vague weasely ways to let them legitimately shape the student body in the way they want.
See also: "Cultural fit" when hiring.
One of my roommates who was premed had a "hot car" poster as a motivational study aid. After a short term as a candy striper at a local hospital, he changed majors. The system works! ;-)
At a certain point, grades become arbitrary and won’t necessarily select for the best candidates. Obviously the current system doesn’t, either.
The actual solution is to increase the number of slots for training doctors to match the huge number of qualified applicants. It makes even more sense given that there is a shortage of doctors and health care costs are astronomical.
I want a doctor who was a strong student with diverse experiences, lots of soft skills and can handle the entire psychological spectrum of being a doctor, not the doctor who was solely the best at exams.
> Because there are so many applicants that have good grades.
So train more doctors.
That would increase competition and thus depress wages for existing doctors, who are the ones who make the decisions here. I heard, from a medical school attendee, that she overheard some doctors discussing whether it would be a good idea to require a fifth year of medical school to become a general practitioner (luckily, they were like, "Eh... nah"). It did not seem like it bothered them that this would make it even harder for civilians to get medical care.
I thought lawmakers made the decisions. Silly me! :-D
2 replies →
> Because there are so many applicants that have good grades.
Sounds like we need more spots for these people to go