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Will adcoms accept community college and online classes? Or is there a stigma?
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Our question today revolves around online and community college courses. And more specifically, are there any sort of negative biases out there for those courses?
Answer:
Humans are involved in this process and humans have biases. During the pandemic, basically, every school went online, including medical schools.
One example is Hopkins Medical School, which is changing its policies around online courses, which is amazing. Now, that is just their stance in public. Hopefully, behind the scenes, they’re giving equal weight to online courses.
Another example is Northwestern Medical School. They have a policy that the rigor of the courses is looked at in terms of whether or not they like your class. They have to determine whether or not your 3.7 GPA is a 3.7 GPA.
They were specifically pressured into saying that they take community college classes and they would accept them depending on the rigor of the class. But this is another way of saying they’re not really taking community college classes. They are purposefully discriminating against community college students. But on their homepage, they say they’re trying to reduce bias in medical education.
Again, those are two institutions out of 200 plus schools here in the U.S. Therefore, you can’t really paint a picture in broad strokes, and say that every school will accept online courses like Hopkins. On the flip side, you also can’t say that every school is going to discriminate against community college courses as Northwestern does.
Look at this process in the macro. There are schools that accept online courses. There will be schools that accept community college courses. But not every school accepts either of them.
Ultimately, there is bias out there. And it may affect your ability to get into a medical school. And that depends on the schools you’re applying to.
Therefore, try to reach out to the schools that you’re interested in and look into how they view online courses. Tell them that online classes work best for your schedule since you’re a nontrad, and you have a family and other responsibilities. Ask them if you will be viewed equally compared to students taking them at a four-year university.
'This process is run by humans, humans have bias.'Click To TweetWe all come to the table with our own judgments and biases. And we hope that a lot of these things are taken out of the equation, but unfortunately, they’re still there. So use that to help guide you on your journey.
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