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medicator007
12-17-2002, 12:00 PM
G'day,

I was recently at the McGill admissions website and just wanted to point out something that i think may be confusing to some applicants with respect to requirements.

We all know that a minimum MCAT score of 30 is required for entry. And yet when you look on the bottom of the page, you see that the "average overall score" for a recently admitted class is 30.55 .... intrigued? I know i was, as this would seem to indicate that they accept people with MCAT scores below 30.

However, they also post the average scores in each of the sections of the test. What they did was simply add up the averages of the sections to generate the "average overall score", which as anyone knows is rather interesting math. As a sum of averages is not overly representative of the true situation.

Example.... someone may get a VR-7 but score really well on the other sections and get the thirty. This throw off the numbers..... A more representative stat would be to post the average of the total score for each student.... but who knows?

Bottom line...... you still need AT LEAST the thirty for admissions.

Just thought it would be helpful to point that out as a number of friends have called me since that data was posted wondering how many people with MCATs under 30 there must be in the class.

Cheers,
Medicator

faqir9
12-17-2002, 04:31 PM
I am a member of the set of anyone and thus know there is "interesting math" going on in this thread....although perhaps it is not on the Mcgill end.

cheech10
12-17-2002, 04:44 PM
The sum of section averages will be the average of the total sums in this case. No funny math is going on; try it on a sample data set and see.

medicator007
12-17-2002, 07:04 PM
All i can say is :o Oooops..... good thing math was not a section on the MCAT. Didn't intend to imply that some sort of conspiracy was abounding, just trying to make sense of the data.Now i'm really intrigued

Pardon the "conspiratorial" tone,
The Medicator will now crawl back into his hole

cheech10
12-18-2002, 06:33 AM
Don't take it so harshly, you just looked at it quickly. It's better to assume they're not equal anyways, and work on that assumption.

You are right that the distribution has to be pretty funky to have a cut-off of 30/45 and average out to 30.55/45 (especially since the MCAT distribution overall isn't that narrow...).

medicator007
12-18-2002, 03:11 PM
Thanks Cheech,

Found myself feeling really stupid after blowing that one:rolleyes !

I too am a little surprised that the cutoff is 30 and the overall average is 30.55 ..... really doesnt make sense to me, but then i'm not going to postulating any explanations for that.

Cheers,
Medicator

PS... will you be coming to McGill for MedGames? If so, i owe you a beer for correcting the error of my ways :D

UWOMED2005
12-18-2002, 04:07 PM
I don't deserve a free beer, but I just wanted to point out that you'll be getting a whole whackload of us Westerners that weekend. Some of us (myself included) are heading up to Tremblant a few days to make up for the lack of downhill skiing in the list of competitions. . . :)

cheech10
12-18-2002, 04:24 PM
Yeah, I'll be there, along with most of my class. I'll keep an eye out for you, and we can share many beers...

medicator007
12-19-2002, 10:02 AM
Most excellent!

Should be a good time!

Medicator