Online Submission Process Fails Medical School Hopefuls
More than 30,000 of the most hard-driving students in America now have an extra reason for heart palpitations: near-collapse of a computer system that distributes their applications to medical school.
And with life decisions at stake, applicants who have been striving for straight A’s since middle school are not taking the technological betrayal lightly.
“You couldn’t pick a worse group of people to throw a bombshell in the middle of,” said Richard Silverman, director of admissions at Yale University School of Medicine.
In a move that was supposed to speed decision-making, the clearinghouse for the first time this year asked students to file their applications online. But a series of software bugs has nearly crippled its efforts to process applications for the 16,000 medical school slots available for the 2002 academic year.
“It’s just a black hole,” lamented James Chen, 24, of Los Angeles, whose online application was submitted in June but still hasn’t reached his more than 25 prospective schools. “We’re all just super frustrated. I never expected it to culminate in this.”
The breakdowns mean delays of several weeks or more in applications and admissions. And they have set off a scramble among many students to apply to their top-choice schools directly, before someone else grabs their possible slot.
Administrators at the nation’s 125 medical schools aren’t happy either. Many are encouraging students to apply directly--via the low-tech but reliable paper method. All five medical schools in the UC system last week hurriedly unveiled an application specific to their campuses.
The admissions director at the Tulane School of Medicine in New Orleans was among the first to “pull the cord” and establish a parallel admissions system. Tulane wants applicants to print out their stalled online applications and send them in.
Sweating the Small Stuff
But students are fretting over the most minute details.
For instance, the formatting of online personal essays is lost when they are printed, so they appear to be one long paragraph.
Almost obsessively, students are sending letters explaining that they know how to use paragraphs and that the flaws shouldn’t be held against them.
“These are compulsive people, and that’s very typical,” said Joseph Pisano, Tulane’s associate dean of medical school admissions. “They’re getting ulcers over this.”
Chatter on the Web site https://www.studentdoctor.net has been devoted to hand-wringing and incredulity. One contributor said it is a miracle that no one has filed a class-action lawsuit.
“I didn’t think this whole thing could get any worse,” said another correspondent at the site’s online bulletin board, “but it seems to be getting worse by the second.”
The idea behind the clearinghouse--which for years involved copious paperwork, then computer disks--is that instead of applying to each individual medical school, students submit a master application to a system run by the Assn. of American Medical Colleges. Nearly every school requires students to use this service.
The goal of the centralized system is to process and verify transcripts and scores on the Medical College Admission Test, or MCAT, saving colleges time and money.
But this year things started off bad and got worse.
First, software malfunctions kept booting students off the Internet site as they tried to file sections of their applications. Once that was fixed, other glitches hampered the association’s ability to verify contents. A third problem still plagues the process: The system can’t get the data to the colleges.
“Applications that should have been arriving in June still haven’t come in,” said Silverman, the Yale admissions director.
USC biochemistry graduate student Andrew Rice said it took him more than 50 hours to complete his online application, compared with three hours when he filled out an unsuccessful paper application in 1995.
Rice said he has spent $120 on telephone calls to the association to inquire about his application. Mostly, he said, he’s been on hold.
Timing, to prospective medical students, is key. Most take the MCAT in April of their junior year and complete their required courses so they can be among the first applicants. Because most colleges have a rolling admissions process, which stays open until all seats are filled, applying early is considered an advantage.
Kenechi Ejebe, a senior at Carleton College in Minnesota, said it took him about 100 hours to complete the online form. Because he did not have access to a computer at home or at his summer job, he would drive 30 minutes to his college library in the middle of the night and chip away at the application. “It added a lot of stress,” he said.
Target Date for Fix Quickly Slipping Away
Jordan J. Cohen, president of the Assn. of American Medical Colleges, said he doesn’t know when all of the problems will be fixed.
“If I knew the answer to that question, we would win the lottery,” he said, adding that progress is being made each day.
“We had hoped by the end of this month that everything would be up and running. But . . . the closer we get to that date, the less confident I am about it.”
Some admissions officials said they pleaded with the association to keep the old system in place while testing the online process.
But Cohen said officials had to jump to the Web because the old computer system that organized applications no longer worked.
“We’re going to examine our decision-making process thoroughly, but at the moment, looking back, I think we made the right decision in terms of moving the whole process to the Web,” he said.
To get some information to schools, the association is sending to medical schools, via overnight mail, copies of the unverified applications it has printed out.
Frustrated, more than 40 medical schools have created a process by which students can submit applications directly to them before their verified data arrive. All the schools still require students to try using the association’s system, even if it doesn’t work now, hoping the problems soon will be ironed out.
Dr. J. Harold Helderman, admissions committee chairman at Vanderbilt University Medical School, said that typically, by the start of September the association would have verified information on about 1,500 of the school’s 3,500 annual applicants. This year, he said, data on only 367 of Vanderbilt’s 2,000 applicants have been verified so far.
Tired of waiting, officials decided to skip ahead. Normally, Vanderbilt sends its own more detailed, secondary applications only to students in whom it is interested.
This year, the secondary application went to everyone. “In the past, that meant something important,” Helderman said. “This year, it’s just to avoid further delay.”
