Changes to Unimelb MD entrance

[Alter]

There have been a couple of changes to entry requirements for the unimelb MD program and I figure they're worth bringing up here.

Dear Students,

Please note the changes to selection criteria for the Doctor of Medicine (MD) 2019 intake and onwards. These are documented within the University handbook link below (under Notes section):

https://handbook.unimelb.edu.au/courses/mc-dmed/entry-participation-requirements

The decision to give the final GPA year the same weighting as the preceding year was made by the Melbourne Medical School. This was in response to the University’s Breadth Taskforce 2016 recommendation relating to concerns about the strategic use of level one subjects (including breadth study) by some students in their final year, and the potential unfair advantage given to these applicants in the calculation of the GPA.

In addition, the decision to increase the weighting of interview in the final course ranking was made in response to research that has shown that the Multiple Mini Interview is the most reliable predictor of assessment performance in the clinical years of the MD course, and in recognition that it measures important attributes beyond academic performance, which is assessed by both the other instruments.

These changes only apply to the Doctor of Medicine, but not for the Doctor of Dental Surgery or Doctor of Physiotherapy 2019 intakes.

tl;dr: wGPA is now 1:2:2 instead of 1:2:3 for years; interview weighting is 50% instead of 33% formally, so it's now 25/25/50 GPA/GAMSAT/interview.

Interested in hearing the thoughts of those interested in going into med and those that are already completing medical degrees as to how impactful this change will be. My initial impressions are that these changes are most likely for the better overall; however, it's fairly dubious to make these changes effective immediately.

I'll talk about the first change to begin with. The fact that I went into my third year of university and selected subjects, etc. on the basis that the weighting wouldn't change from 1:2:3 for each year is quite disheartening as it makes it increasingly difficult to secure a place with poor first year marks (a reduced third year weighting means that 1st and 2nd year are both worth more, alike). The changes seem to also want to target people 'strategically saving' level 1 breadths for final year so that they can't inflate their wGPA before applying for med school. I find this argument to be a bit of a joke. If there's a problem with the way that rules work regarding levels and breadth completion within internal degrees, then the solution shouldn't be to punish people that try to use this in their favour, it should be to fix the fundamental issue of the system. The level of a subject or when you take it isn't necessarily indicative of its difficult, so this argument doesn't really hold water.

If you try to follow this logic further, then it pursues a pretty poor principle. E.g. you can technically do German 7 as a level 1 subject and 'save it' for your final year of study. Does this mean you're cheating the system and trying to get away with inflating your GPA? Obviously not. I feel like this argument cherry picks and doesn't really resolve the grander issue that no two subjects are graded in the same way/no two subjects share the same difficulty. Honestly, it was wiser to just leave this untouched instead of arbitrarily punishing people for trying to improve their marks.

To be transparent, I'm biased as fuck on this topic because I'm doing Spanish 1 in my final semester before med applications, so I'm clearly one of the people the new rule is trying to target. However, it also has the unintended side effect of making it difficult to recover from poor first year marks and neglects the point of the 1:2:3 weighting originally existing -- most recent grades most accurately reflect a person's academic capabilities. I'd think this change were an actual problem but triple weighting was already stupidly high anyway, so 20/40/40% is honestly a decent middle ground.

Re: increased interview weighting - this is an excellent change. If people already need a crazy good GPA/GAMSAT combo to secure an interview to begin with, then it only makes sense that these requirements become less important after you've already filtered through strong students. Much work has been done to show that interview performance is actually a better indicator of success in the later parts of the medical degree - i.e. there's a stronger correlation between a high interview score and scores in final year(s) med school than between GPA and how good of a doctor you actually are.

Excuse typos, posting from phone.

tl;dr #2: GPA weighting changes sort of follow stupid reasoning, but the end result still works anyway so they're fair. Interview weighting changes seem to be a smart move.

[vox nihili]

Really interesting changes. The justification for the change to interviews is interesting (i.e. that they're a strong predictor of performance in clinical years). This rests on the assumption that the assessment in clinical years is a good assessment of one's medicine (debatable). Arguably, people who perform well on OSCEs are people who are naturally confident/able to interact with people. Whilst these are certainly necessary requirements for a doctor, they are not the be all and end all.
The decision also sends the message that the clinical years are more important than research and the pre-clinical year. This is fairly reasonable, to be honest, but it's an interesting message to send.

All in all I'm fairly agnostic about this. I just feel really awful that the interview, an already horribly stressful experience, will be made all the more so.

[Alter]

Really annoyed about the changes to be honest. In my view, it just makes the whole process less transparent; the only criteria that can be objectively judged are GPA and GAMSAT score, so to emphasise them less and value a subjective 1 hour interview more is a terrible decision imho. Also, what was with the change to the GPA calculation?

True, I agree with you here, but surely the answer is to make the interview process more transparent, because I still think it's important to actually have it count for something after you already reject most applicants with the interview offers.

I have no idea why they have chosen to weigh third year subjects less. I think that this change is particularly problematic given that 2019 and 2020 applicants have not been 'grandfathered' in. First year subjects are now, comparatively, worth more, so it really does punish those who take a semester or two to adjust to university learning styles.

I agree this is pretty straight-up dodgy, so I empathise with your frustration. It'd be analogous to Monash not warning people that they're only accepting their own undergrad for med and suddenly making the change (albeit obviously not as extreme), which they didn't do. Kinda disappointing but it honestly feels like there's no avenue for complaint or discourse. Unsurprisingly the issue underlying both changes here is one of decisions being made behind closed doors so you basically just have to 'cop it' as a student.

[ooottafvgvah]

I think that this change is particularly problematic given that 2019 and 2020 applicants have not been 'grandfathered' in.

Hi. Sorry for hijacking the discourse with a dumb question.

Could someone explain what "grandfathering/grandparenting" means in this context? I also stumbled upon the term somewhere else saying that "There will not be any 'grandparenting' of students who are currently in third-year."

[Alter]

Hi. Sorry for hijacking the discourse with a dumb question.

Could someone explain what "grandfathering/grandparenting" means in this context? I also stumbled upon the term somewhere else saying that "There will not be any 'grandparenting' of students who are currently in third-year."

Hey, no worries for hijacking at all - genuine question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause

In this context, to 'grandfather' in the students would mean that anyone who is currently affected by the changes (e.g me; abc12345j) would gain exception, and be allowed to continue with rights acquired by the rules that were established as we originally entered the scenario. However, in this situation, we are not being grandfathered in because the changes come into play immediately, for MD 2019 entry. Hope this clarifies.

EDIT: wording

[vox nihili]

Really annoyed about the changes to be honest. In my view, it just makes the whole process less transparent; the only criteria that can be objectively judged are GPA and GAMSAT score, so to emphasise them less and value a subjective 1 hour interview more is a terrible decision imho. Also, what was with the change to the GPA calculation? I have no idea why they have chosen to weigh third year subjects less. I think that this change is particularly problematic given that 2019 and 2020 applicants have not been 'grandfathered' in. First year subjects are now, comparatively, worth more, so it really does punish those who take a semester or two to adjust to university learning styles.

Describing the interview as subjective is fairly inaccurate. Surely there's a degree of subjectivity to it, no doubt, but the interview is reasonably structured. Perhaps a better criticism of the interview is that it is so much dependent on the individual's performance on that day. They have a bad day, boom, there it goes. There's less opportunity to get a strong sense of what an individual's level of talent actually is.

In terms of the GPA spread, they were fairly open about that. I agree with you 100% about the fact that first year should be worth little. The transition into university is particularly difficult from people from disadvantaged backgrounds, so seeing first year "matter" more will only make it even harder for people who already struggle enormously to find places in med.

Hi. Sorry for hijacking the discourse with a dumb question.

Could someone explain what "grandfathering/grandparenting" means in this context? I also stumbled upon the term somewhere else saying that "There will not be any 'grandparenting' of students who are currently in third-year."

Keeping the old rules for those people because they can't go back and work harder in their first year basically.

EDIT: beaten to it by Alter

[vox nihili]

Yeah that's a fair point too. I do agree that the interview has 'something' to offer. Obviously they don't want to let people into med who can't adequately communicate with patients, or are doing it for the wrong reasons etc etc. However, I do think the interview process should 1. Be more transparent (as you have suggested), perhaps entailing the release of scores or feedback of some description. 2. Not be worth 50% (this is way way too much for a 1 hour task imho)

And yes, you are absolutely right about complaining being a futile exercise...we just have to cop it and carry on so to speak haha

They should actually release your scores. They always tell you they don't and then do. In fact, we were told we'd be the last year to get them and the year that followed ended up getting them too so hopefully!!

[qwdfbn1996]

I am a bit bothered by the scaling up in weighting of the interview to be honest. As people have already pointed out, performance really depends on the day and I'm a bit annoyed that your performance in that hour or so is weighted twice as much as say the work you put into your entire undergraduate degree. I understand that to get an interview in the first place you need a pretty good GPA GAMSAT combo but as important as I feel communication skills etc are I do feel like it's going to really hurt those who might just underperform a bit on the day. The 1:2:2 weighting change is a bit excessive imo, I really don't think it gives that big of an advantage and if it really does make such a difference, I guess it's just up to people who care enough to take advantage of the flaw in the system themselves.

[ooottafvgvah]

Thanks for the clarifications, Alter and vox. 

Regarding the new wGPA calculations, while I do share the sentiments about the new changes stripping some applicants off a chance to redeem their grades in their final year, some might have a different view on this change. For those that are stressing over their 3rd year performance, amidst the march GAMSAT, interviews and other commitments, I think the new change might take some stress off them, in a sense that a hiccup in 1 or 2 subjects would not affect their GPA as significantly as before. (ie. Having said that, however, I personally think that the 1/2/3 weighting is more appropriate indicator of performance, or even for using wGPA in the first place, since it better rewards students who perform well in the 3rd year subjects/units, which are traditionally perceived as being more difficult.

I'm in no position to judge which component (GPA/GAMSAT/MMI) should be weighed more than the others, but I must admit I'm pretty bummed out by the 25/25/50 simply because it now raises the level of uncertainties further. With the old system, I thought I'd be able breathe a little more easily after the GAMSAT results since I would've known for certain (given I maintain my grades, of course) how much of the 66.67% of the whole process I've secured. With the new system, it would mean that I still have to keep hustling until the interviews in Sept. These are purely personal opinions since I was relying more on GPA (and maybe even the GAMSAT) than the interview, so the advantage I thought I had is shaved off a little by the new changes. Others who are putting their money on their MMI performance will of course have a different take on this. 


Nevertheless, for the prospective applicants in their 3rd year, I guess the changes don't really implicate our short-term focus much in terms of 1st sem grades and the GAMSAT, since GPA/GAMSAT combo are still used for interview offers. The added stress is now to perform well for the MMIs even for those who have exceptional GPA and GAMSAT scores.

One last thing, just out of curiosity, I'm wondering what you guys think in terms of the implications on the number of interview offers. Would you think they will send out more interview offers as compared to previous years? My logic behind this is that since the interview now has a greater weightage, they might want to give an opportunity for those with relatively lower GPA/GAMSAT scores but can perform well in the MMIs, and hence lower the GPA/GAMSAT cut-offs for interview offers.
But of course, the other possibility is that despite the increased weightage on interview performance, they might still want to maintain the same level of academic performance of the students and thus make no changes to GPA/GAMSAT cut-offs or the number of interview offers.