If you are reading this, you are probably accepted to a medical school, so congratulations! If not, well, this is helpful knowledge to know going forward whether you will be applying soon or have already applied. We’re going to talk today about if medical schools can pull your acceptance and how this might happen. Lets get into it!
Have medical schools rescinded acceptances before?
The short answer is yes. This happens, although the amount of times that it’s happened is less important. The big thing here is they really only pull their acceptances if you’ve done something VERY wrong, or you failed to meet their expectations classwork wise or grade wise.
Here’s an example of multiple schools pulling acceptances due to bad social media behavior.
Here’s one where a student lied about the hours of her extracurriculars.
You get the point. These are more the reasons why you’d get rescinded.
What circumstances would they likely pull your acceptance for?
- Failed background check
- This can be any form of criminal activity that raises an alarm for the admissions committee. Pretty much any felony would most definitely get you looked at. Misdemeanor probably would too. Speeding tickets or traffic violations would not be held against you to the point they would rescind the A.
- lied on application
- We both know this one is a big one. Most folks say that they don’t really call your references or look into the hours if you are reasonable and nothing conflicts. Sit down and count up all your hours for all your activities. How many hours per week would this show you are putting into these activities outside of school? Does it say you are working 50 hours a week with school? Doing 50 hours of research on top of volunteering 10 hours a week on top of another 10 mentoring kids during your summers? Well, 70 hours a week isn’t impossible, but they may raise an eyebrow. Think about it.
- not meeting the pre-requisites for classwork or their GPA
- This one is unfortunately the most common. Check all classes they require AND the grade they require. Some places only take B’s and up. Some won’t take a C in a pre-medical science class, but will for other classes in art etc. Read their website and make sure. If you need to retake a class the summer after you graduate, do it. They WILL check and they WILL pull it.
- Failing your last semester of classes or not maintaining consistent grades with your normal
- This one is more one I read about on their website and haven’t heard of anyone having this happen. Basically, if your application is a 4.0 with all A’s since forever, and you go off and make 3 C’s and a B your final semester, they might look into this. I am not sure what they would do to be honest, but just do your best while enjoying the acceptance.
- Criminal charges post acceptance
- This one will be found out eventually. The administrators at my current medical school all said that if you pick up a criminal charge while in medical school, they will work with you to get through it and try not to get you kicked out. If you don’t tell them though, I got the hint they are much harder on you. I am not sure if a background check is run every year on us or not, but it seems they had some sort of way of knowing. Your certiphi background check that occurs when applying is at the beginning of the cycle, so any criminal charge incurred afterward wouldn’t get reflected on it. Although, it may be possible they check for updates and will notify the school if anything new pops up on it.
- Letters of recommendation changed to be negative
- This is another unlikely one, but if any of you read Reddit, you’ve probably seen instances where a mentor or doctor some pre-medical student worked with changed the letter of rec after the student announced they were quitting due to medical school. Especially if this was directly after receiving their first acceptance. It’s rare, but you never know if it’ll happen. In this case, a lot of letters of rec might just pull their letter leaving you with one less. This is why it’s important to have 1-2 more letters than the minimum of every school! Do that. If they change it to be negative, I think you will get an email that they turned in a new version of the letter, but you won’t be allowed to view it. You can beat them to it by removing them as a letter writer before they submit the change, but I don’t believe you can do anything after it happens.
- Finding a great mentor can help mitigate this. Check out my write ups on finding and growing with a mentor here.
Congratulations on your acceptance if you have one and start gearing up for medical school. Learn what Anki is and how it can change your world here.