Are med school admission policies in for a change?

Jordan Cohen, MD, the Assn. of American Medical Colleges' top official, wants schools to use subjective criteria along with test scores to both attract and select students.

By Jay Greene, AMNews staff. Dec. 24/31, 2001.

Calling for a more balanced method of selecting medical students, Jordan Cohen, MD, president of the Assn. of American Medical Colleges, said standardized test scores and grades should be used only as part of an overall admission assessment that would also include personal characteristics, leadership abilities, past experiences and maturity.

"My concern here is the imbalance that currently exists in how we convey to applicants the selection criteria we use," said Dr. Cohen in a speech at the AAMC's recent annual meeting. "I'm referring, of course, to our tendency to underemphasize, because they are harder to measure, the personal characteristics we are seeking in our applicants, and to overemphasize the more easily measured indices of academic achievement."

Dr. Cohen said he believes focusing on scores discourages some undergraduates from applying to medical school, which may be one reason applications are down the past five years. For the 2001-2002 school year, the AAMC said there were 34,859 applications to the nation's 125 allopathic medical schools, a 6% decline from the previous year.

"If more such intelligent and dedicated idealists were to perceive that we would give as much weight to what's in their hearts as to what's in their heads, a career in medicine would no doubt attract them strongly," Dr. Cohen said. "As it is, I'm persuaded that many don't perceive this balance in our selection criteria, and turn away convinced that medicine is for grade-grubbing Philistines but not for them." [...]