I know this is a topic that's been discussed on here in the past, but I wanted to bring it back up because there are so many people on here who are getting mostly clinical honors. I simply cannot relate. For most of our clinical rotations, 15% of students get H, 35% get HP, and 50% get P with grades determined by being curved against our classmates rather than absolute thresholds. I'm on my surgery rotation now and recently got my medicine grade back after working my heart out. High pass. Devastated. OB and Psych were also high pass. Family med I got merely passed. My only honors so far has been Peds.
My shortcomings have been varied. I got 95th percentile on the medicine shelf, but a tough-grading attending made it statistically impossible to be in the top 15% (evals were 60% of the course grade and most attendings give very generous evals). Similar story with OB. Rocked the shelf, 1 of my 3 evals (by a resident) was horrid, and missed H by 0.6%. But it's not always evals. Psych we had an in-house test, struggled with it, and missed H by 0.8% despite a near perfect eval. Same situation for family, missing HP by 0.9%. Of course these close misses don't mean squat because transcripts show letter grades when it's all said and done.
Both clinical grades and AOA ride hand-in-hand at my school and are pinnacle on your application. At this point, AOA is... well, let's say pretty much not gonna happen. Of course I'm working by @$$ off for honors in surgery. That all said, can a student be realistically desirable for the more competitive programs with so few honors and not AOA? Sorry for being such a worry wart. Matching is so stressful...
Other stuff: Step 1 in 260-265 range. Non-top 40 private US MD. Nearly all honors M1 and M2 years. 2 pubs (neither first author) and finalizing two more this year as 1st and 3rd authors (none of these 4 are ortho; decided ortho late). I have around a dozen abstracts/presentations and will graduate from our Research Track. Tons and tons of school involvement, tutoring, volunteering, and leadership.
My shortcomings have been varied. I got 95th percentile on the medicine shelf, but a tough-grading attending made it statistically impossible to be in the top 15% (evals were 60% of the course grade and most attendings give very generous evals). Similar story with OB. Rocked the shelf, 1 of my 3 evals (by a resident) was horrid, and missed H by 0.6%. But it's not always evals. Psych we had an in-house test, struggled with it, and missed H by 0.8% despite a near perfect eval. Same situation for family, missing HP by 0.9%. Of course these close misses don't mean squat because transcripts show letter grades when it's all said and done.
Both clinical grades and AOA ride hand-in-hand at my school and are pinnacle on your application. At this point, AOA is... well, let's say pretty much not gonna happen. Of course I'm working by @$$ off for honors in surgery. That all said, can a student be realistically desirable for the more competitive programs with so few honors and not AOA? Sorry for being such a worry wart. Matching is so stressful...
Other stuff: Step 1 in 260-265 range. Non-top 40 private US MD. Nearly all honors M1 and M2 years. 2 pubs (neither first author) and finalizing two more this year as 1st and 3rd authors (none of these 4 are ortho; decided ortho late). I have around a dozen abstracts/presentations and will graduate from our Research Track. Tons and tons of school involvement, tutoring, volunteering, and leadership.