Selection process

[gryph25]

I was wondering if someone could explain the selection process to me a bit more. So once you are selected for an interview is everyone student in that pool essentially on an equal playing field in terms of academic average i.e. entrance is now dependent on how well you do in the interview and experience? Or is it still mainly weighted on your pre-reqs and semester averages?

Just trying to make sense of this years admission stats! 
 

[tilac]

Hey there, 
This past year the interviews had to take a different form as the pandemic did not allow for a traditional MMI. In typical years the final ranking of your application (assuming no other red flags) in 35% your MMI score and 65% grades. This means that higher grades do have a significant advantage (for example, a 96 average would allow a person to get in with a 68 or so interview in a traditional year). This year, the top 200 applicants by grades were selected for interviews (as usual). However, these applicants then completed a casper and a non-MMI interview. It is unknown how exactly the final weighting or decisions were made, but it can be imagined that the casper scores may have played a role. 

However, some inferences can be made from the stats this year compared to last year. Such as that the average person interviewed had a similar average to last year (90.39 vs 90.56). However, the average person accepted increased from 90.89 to 92.2. Also, the lowest average interviewed was an 88.5 while lowest accepted was a 90.5, differing from the previous year where lowest interviewed and accepted were both around 88. Also keep in mind that it can typically be assumed that it is more difficult and thus less likely to have higher marks than lower ones. There are a number of reasons why this could be but one thing for sure is that marks seemed to play a bigger role this year than normal, or at least people with higher marks tended to fair better on this year's interview format. 

Furthermore, to my understanding, references and experience are not directly used to place you in the ranking. As long as your references are good and your experience is reasonably diverse, it seems you should have an equal chance in that category. There's no suggestion that anything changed with that this year and there isn't really a great way to objectively evaluate people's experiences, so it is left up to you to sell yourself. However, based on the statistics above you can make a guess on your potential to move up or down the list. 

We also have no idea what the interviews will look like this year as of right now, so take all of this with a grain of salt. 

Hope this helps