Hello, welcome to my blog.

Hello everyone. As you probably can guess from my title, I am currently going through the process of applying to graduate entry medicine in Australia. Right now, I have just completed my second year biomed exams.

Second year has been much harder than first year in terms of the core subjects. However, everything we learnt this year would be quite useful for medicine. Anyway, I think I did reasonably well and I'll get my results in a few weeks.

I plan to apply to the University of Melbourne's new "MD" medicine program as a first preference next year. This is although my best chance under the current entry criteria would be to preference UQ first, since they don't have an interview and only have a hurdle GPA which I could pass simply by passing every subject with a 50 from now on at uni (although  the UQ selection criteria is speculated to change to "GPA rank" in the future) and rank 100% by GAMSAT score. I pass this year's threshold with a high margin.

My current GPA is not bad (above average relative to people who get into medicine graduate entry), but not as high as many of my peers. My GAMSAT, although very good for most unis, has some shine taken away from it due to Melbourne's "equal weighting" of sections instead of having a double weighted science section like most unis. I'm not sure why Melbourne would think that weighting "reasoning in humanities and social science" and "written communication" on par with "reasoning in biological and social sciences" would increase predictive ability (2/3 arts weighting!!!) but I guess that's how it is.

My main concern is the interview though. It's better than in the past where Melbourne weighted the interview 100%, but I still would have liked the interview to be foregone, since the other aspects of my application are much better.

Anyway, for a view of predictability of GPA, GAMSAT and Interview, here's a study by UQ. Note that they used a panel interview though, rather than a multi-mini interview. The MMI format was designed to eliminate interviewer bias and effects due to first impressions which are hard to overcome, and "halo" effects, so that the result should be more accurate. Nevertheless, the GAMSAT and interview were not very strong predictors compared to GPA: [1]

I don't particularly like interviews being part of the selection process, although others have discussed that topic a lot. I don't particularly think that the formation of a standardized test for selecting medical school applicants is a bad thing though; I consider exams to be a "gold standard" if the exam content is right. It does seem like the MCAT in the USA has relatively good predictive ability[2]. However, I think the GAMSAT under-emphasizes the value of remembering facts in science; being a reasoning test for the most part. Of course, reasoning is a good skill to have, but I think the most difficult part of studying is remembering everything. Perhaps that is why GAMSAT isn't such a good predictor.

It would seem like the "fairest" way to select people would be to just use the GPA to rank people, and disregard GAMSAT and interview. However, there are two problems I can see with that:

1. Universities other than Melbourne do not require prerequisites for graduate entry medicine. There at least needs to be a screening test to determine if applicants have enough science knowledge to succeed in a 4-year course; less time than the 5 or 6 year MBBS courses that undergrads do.

2. Grading practices are not equal for all subjects, or degrees, or universities. University of Melbourne is trying to address this by using their MAGPA in the future, although without standardization comparing against other unis as well, this may not be as effective as it can be[3]. But without such standardization, akin to scaling in VCE or HSC, there is no real fair comparison between different degrees or simply different subjects.

Of course, another solution to improve predictability would be to make the GAMSAT more like the MCAT, although that would disadvantage people from non-science backgrounds especially. Also the high predictability of the MCAT in the USA for medical school performance is from a background where most universities require science prerequisites for medical school admission, so the predictability may not be so great in Australia where that is not the case. However, I contend that the predictability would probably be better than the GAMSAT is right now.


Anyway, that's all for now. Enjoy reading!

From nucleophilic addition-elimination