I think you have been misinformed about the accepted percentage. Either you have or I have. I couldn't find the official report by AAMC but a simple google search yields an article about 2013's results.
http://www.kaptest.com/blog/med-school-pulse/2014/09/04/many-people-get-medical-school/ stated that "According to the AAMC, in 2013, over 48,000 people applied to medical school in the U.S., which was a record number! Of those nearly fifty thousand applicants, just over 20,000 (20,055) of them matriculated into their first year of medical school. This is the first year that medical school matriculations topped 20,000! Fortunately for you hopeful applicants, medical schools continue to add spots to meet demand for future physicians." 20,000/48,000 = 41.67% of people who applied were accepted to at least ONE medical school. 41% isn't bad really... If you wanted to target a specific school then yeah that's gonna be difficult but overall not bad at all.
I think the only real way of finding out if it's harder to get an interview is to average at least 100 school's interview percentages for both PA and MD/DO schools.
Who wouldn't use grade replacement if they had the chance to? Why handicap yourself in the DO competition?
That is actually interesting. I think it's difficult to trust what we find on google about this stuff although you're source may very well be correct.
One thing to consider about how many get in, is how many apply. The MCAT keeps a lot of people from getting that far and probably a lot of those whom don't get accepted applied before their scores came back and found out that they just wasted a lot of money.
As a pre-pa, essentially if you have the grades (3.5-3.6), you can take the GRE cold and as long as you don't bomb it you're golden. In fact, in another thread where I was defending how tough PA admissions are (you can search my post history) I was corrected by another poster. After multiple google searches I realized that pre-PA GPAs can be as low as ~3.2 and one can still expect an acceptance if you apply broadly.
On the other hand, DO applicants can get in with low gpa too. But their MCAT better be at MD level. In fact, I've seen one poster on here with a 2.97 gpa but a 34 MCAT get multiple acceptances. That guy would have went down in flames in PA admissions. The REALLY low MCAT folks (like 24-25 or lower) had everything else stellar and probably rocked a post-bac and had something else remarkable about him/her. I don't know why they wouldn't just retake the MCAT tbh though.
As far as grade replacement, its usefulness in my opinion is greatly overhyped. It's great for that nontraditional 29 y/o applicant who wants to apply and realizes that 10 years ago he made a C in bio 101. He can retake that and wipe the slate clean from a stupid mistake from way back when. But SDN makes it seem like you can bomb half you're pre-reqs at a university and go retake them at a community college and everything's forgiven. Admissions can still see those old grades and if you do something like get a C, retake for a B, retake at community college for an A, it's not going to fly. My sources here are DO students and people I know that work at a school in my area.
10-15 years ago, I would have probably agreed with you that PA admissions is more rigorous than DO. However, ever since, it seems that DO competitiveness has gone up while PA has gone down. MCAT averages have been rising for DO arguably at a faster rate than they have for MD while the MCAT has actually gotten harder. The proliferation of DO schools has slowed it some, but even new schools have stats that are on par with established schools 5-10 years ago.
Conversely, the proliferation of PA schools has really brought down admissions standards. I remember when I originally went pre-pa I thought if I didn't have a 3.7 I was screwed. Now the bar is much lower. The PA profession used to be setup as a second career for experienced healthcare professionals like nurses, EMTs, respiratory therapist, etc. If you didn't have REAL HCE, you weren't a serious applicant. Now it seems to want traditional premeds that just didn't want to take the plunge (I don't blame them), didn't quite have the grades, or just couldn't pass the MCAT. Many schools are only requiring 200-500 hours of HCE and it can be something like shadowing or volunteering. The typical premed stuff, nothing of any real substance. There's definitely less emphasis on ECs and research.
N=1, but with my gpa and HCE, I could have easily gotten into probably most of PA schools. However, there are DO schools that wouldn't even interview me because I had a 3.83 gpa and 504(28 on the old scale) MCAT.
Sorry to derail this thread, but I'm actually enjoying this discussion.
Everyone knows MD>PA>dominos pizza delivery driver>>>>NP in terms of competitiveness. But DO vs. PA isn't something that comes up too often.
. Arguing over how tough it is to do something neither of us wants to do seems silly.. Arguing over how tough it is to do something neither of us wants to do seems silly.
