Quality of Submissions

Hi everyone. I'm new to this site and I only applied to Mac this year. I would like to ask, FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO KNOW, what the quality of the admissions essays is like IN THE CASE OF MCMASTER this year. Good, bad, lots of spelling and grammar problems, a lot of monotony or creative answers? Just wondering..Or are there are a lot of solid candidates, especially considering the increased number of applicants?

I don't know, but i suspect the answer to your question is: "All of the Above."

With more applicants, you are going to have more extremes at either end of the quality spectrum. In other words, there'll be lots of very high-quality essays and applicants, and lots of other applicants who are more borderline. Certainly spelling and grammar mistakes will not be the norm for most essays, but they will definitely be there, and this does nothing to improve the look of one's application.

Regardless of the increased applicants, your own goal needs to be simply to submit the best essay that you can, and emphasize your strengths and why you believe that you would be a strong McMaster med student. It's always tough when you think of all those other people out there, but you've just got to keep your confidence level up that you're a good candidate.

Ian
UBC, Med 4

Hey Macdaddyeh,

I understand your angst and pain, having gone through the long waiting process like so many last year. I am now on the other side of it, and like each of my classmates, I am marking a number of submissions as a cog in the big admission review process.

Ian had some good points to make, but the main take-home thing to realize is that no one could yet come close to having any idea what the bigger picture looks like yet. None of us, and, I suspect, no one on the AdCom will have any idea how this will play out until much closer to the March 1st letter. One could make assumptions based on what I have seen, but I think an overall extrapolation with such a small sample would be meaningless. I strongly suggest, for what it's worth, that you don't take any assertions about the quality of the applicant pool seriously unless you hear it directly from the AdCom. The rest of us (ie students in the programme) would just be talking out of our hats, and you don't deserve to be driven around the bend by people who aren't really in the know (even if they seem close to the know).

The terrible waiting aspect of this process can't be avoided, except by taking a break until March and not thinking about it. I know, easy to say - hard to do. Better though to use the time to prepare yourself for the hoped for interview - not second guessing yourself about an application on which you must have already invested a significant amount of time.

I wish you the best of luck, and please, PLEASE...try not to think about something that is now completely out of your control.

Wow.. Reading your post was the first time that I actually imagined somebody READING the essays that I wrote Is it fun? Are you blown away by some of it? Is it mostly boring and all sounding the same?

Ian and MDwannabe. Thanks for your replies. I understand it would be very difficult if not unfruitful to leak out any information concerning how the essays really appear to be; it is likely a gruellingly subjective process. I believe I did well, but became nervous, like I know many other applicants are, when I found out that the applicant # is way up, particularly at MAC (the only school I applied to for now...doing MCAT next summer).

One question I still have then, particularly for mdwannabe seeing you're on the "other side" is, how exactly does the marking of essays process work? Do you receive the essays randomly and weigh the quality of those given essays against each other?

Hi MDWannabe,
You mentioned that you and your classmates are marking the submissions. (Does this mean that you've already received them and have started on the sorting process?) I ask because my application is still being processed by OMSAS!
Thanks!
p.s. are only the first year med students marking the essays (or students from all the years who volunteer)? I'm just curious

JS28, I hear ya. This was exactly what I was getting at when asking my initial question. I simply wanted to know how the process works, and, by default, what the quality of those applications received is like. Maybe it's just first-time jitters. As I settle into final exams and had a few minutes to reflect, I started thinking about med school again.

Hi JS28 and Macdaddyeh,

I am also a first year med student at Mac and yes, we started to receive the applications last week. I'm not sure what it means that your ( JS28 ) application is still being processed. Maybe that means that your reference letters or transcripts are still being processed? I'm not really sure but it probably is not something to worry about, especially if other applicants are also "being processed".

Reading these essays is pretty much "mandatory" for the first year class and many upper year students also volunteer to read them. We are given 30 submissions each to read. Each essay is evaluated by three people - a student, faculty member and a community member. I haven't started reading mine, so I don't know the quality yet; however remember that each person is only reading 30 out of the 3800, so, like it was said before, no one knows the quality of the entire applicant pool yet.

*Try* not to worry. Easier said than done, I know. Good luck on your exams.

Hi Peachy, JS28, Macdaddyeh:

Peachy: It's been made very clear to us that we can't really comment on the quality of the applications we're reviewing. There are major confidentiality issues involved. I seem to remember there was a (possibly inadvertent) leak last year and the ensuing trauma wasn't pleasant for anyone concerned, so we all have to be very careful.

Macdaddyeh: the applications are meant to be looked at in an absolute sense. For example, everyone in my group is potentially interviewable and/or rejectable. Comparisons must no doubt come into play, since the pile we receive is really the only thing we have to go on. I probably also have in the back of my mind the quality and backgrounds of the people I have met in all years of the programme, and that helps me to develop a baseline.

From discussions with my peers, my sense is that we are all taking this very seriously, recognizing that we aren't far from where we were last year at this time, sitting in your position. That being said, this is clearly a subjective process, and personally I'm sure my application could have easily rubbed some reader the wrong way and been ruled out. To be the approximately 1 in 10 that gets interviewed, I think, involves no small amount of luck. The luck factor is reduced somewhat by having 3 readers review your application, but I'd guess (and this is my opinion only!) that you wouldn't be able to see a huge quality difference between the 300th best application (interviewed) and the 500th best application (rejected). Certainly the process could be more perfect, but the machinery it take to run this process already is pretty overwhelming, given 3680 applications. Maybe it's not great that first years are reading these, but given that 2nd years are already halfway out of the school towards clerkship, the 138 available first year students are in a better position to help. I think we also provide a good balance with the faculty and community members to get a multi-perspective view of each application.

I know there will be inevitable comments on this site, as there were last year, that this is all a subjective crapshoot. And yes, there is some subjectivity involved. I think this is also true of the other schools. I think it is only at Mac (although I invite correction on this point) that you get your percentile ranking on your application if you are rejected, and many have noted the wide variances they see from year to year with the same content. I'm sure you'd find that variance at other schools too - they just don't give you that information to complain about.

Again, I say, you can't do anything about it at this stage. Your time would be much better spent preparing for interviews (which as you may know, is quite an involved process).

Good luck to all of you.

Thank you for your comments MDWannabe! ... (I really meant to ask in general what the experience is like reading these kinds of things, which you answered to some degree, I guess, not about the quality of the applications)

Anyways, enjoy your reading