The Great Academic Arms Race - rise of MCAT and GPA
Thank you for your sacrifice.
You can smell it, can’t you? That faint scent of coffee from the chewed styrofoam coffee cup you've been drinking from for 28 hours, stale Adderall, and the salt from tears of your fallen comrades who dared to get a B+ in organic chemistry.
I am your grizzled, wild-eyed field marshal (ok, fine, Im just an MS1), and this, my friends, is the front line. The war for getting into Med school. And I’ve just returned from the front with the latest intel (more like 15 minutes of Excel sheeting and sleuthing on the internet instead of studying for Na/K+ pump or whatever) from the AAMC—the Association of American Medical Carnage, as I like to call it.
For the past decade, the academic bar for getting into medical school hasn't just been rising; it’s been launched into low-earth orbit by a rocket fueled by the crushed dreams of your predecessors (and Post-baccers). They call it "credentials inflation". I call it the Great Academic Arms Race.
yikers
Let that sink in (Elon Musk style). The average applicant shows up to the fight with a respectable 3.66 GPA and a 506.1 MCAT. But the matriculant, the one who gets the white coat and the lifetime of debt? That bro (or sis) is rocking a nearly 0.15 point higher GPA and a 5-to-6 point advantage on the MCAT. Call it the statistical Grand Canyon between "You Tried" and "Welcome, Doctor." (Now get back to Anki-carding)
The same goes for the MCAT. A 508.7 got you a seat in 2016-17. Today, that score gets you a sympathetic pat on the back and a brochure for a career in… I don’t know, whatever is non-premed
So what’s the takeaway from this dispatch? Should you despair? Should you fling your MCAT flashcards into a ceremonial bonfire?Absolutely not.
Ok. May be a little.
Your application narrative needs to be so compelling it should make the admissions committee weep. You must benchmark yourself not against last year's data, but against the data that will exist next year, which will probably require you to have a 4.0 GPA and an MCAT "score" that would make everything Mozart ever wrote look like a warm-up exercise (520+).
Dismissed!
(ok incase people missed it, satire, but trend is up and indeed its more difficult every year).
Soruces:
1. AAMC FACTS: Applicants and Matriculants Data (2024 Release) This is the most recent data set, which includes "Table A-16: MCAT Scores and GPAs for Applicants and Matriculants to U.S. MD-Granting Medical Schools, Academic Years 2019-2020 through 2024-2025." This table provided the data for the latter half of the above table posted. https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/students-residents/data/facts-applicants-and-matriculants
2. AAMC FACTS: Historical Data Tables (2015-2020 Releases) The data for the earlier years in the table posted above (2015-2016 through 2018-2019) were compiled from previous annual releases of the AAMC FACTS data. Each of these historical reports contains a version of Table A-16 specific to that time period.
