what exactly is the admissions process?

[canijust]

I heard from a med student on an admissions committee that applications are "scored" for certain landmarks (GPA, MCAT, etc.), and then re-organized/prioritized for hoslitc review. I figured that would mean that applications are reviewed within their "cohorts" and those with low stats are continuously pushed toward the back. Is this two-step process a common method at schools? Would adcoms be able to share what their policies are?

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[LizzyM]

Every school does things a bit differently from every other school and a school can change from year to year. There can be a two tier approach where objective measures that can be pulled from specific fields in the application are used to screen and perhaps create a composite score and then applications that exceed a score of X go on to holistic review taking 30 minutes or more while those below a cut-off might get 2 minutes of someone's time to be sure that something major has not been missed.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

I heard from a med student on an admissions committee that applications are "scored" for certain landmarks (GPA, MCAT, etc.), and then re-organized/prioritized for hoslitc review. I figured that would mean that applications are reviewed within their "cohorts" and those with low stats are continuously pushed toward the back. Is this two-step process a common method at schools? Would adcoms be able to share what their policies are?

Quick answer: no... or at least not unless you are coming from an accreditation review.

Application scoring... there are a lot of ways to get the job done... as long as the job gets done. You just have insight on that school's process, which is good information to have.