Sunday, June 27, 2010

MCAT Scores for Medical Students by Gender

The chart above is based on average MCAT scores by gender for students admitted to U.S. medical schools in each year between 2002 and 2009 (data here).  Men consistently have higher MCAT scores (30.975 average score for the 2002-2009 period) than women (29.5375 points) by an annual average of 1.4375 points for this period.  In the most recent year of 2009, men scored higher on average by 1.50 points (31.6 men vs. 30.1 women), which is a statistically significant difference with a t-statistic of 25.08 from a "difference of means test" (prob = 0.0000). 

4 Comments:

At 6/28/2010 5:53 PM, Anonymous Hank said...

Do we have the data on graduation rates by these categories?

 
At 6/30/2010 6:01 PM, Blogger RaplhCramden said...

The graduation rates is a great comment. If women graduate at a higher rate than men, then the schools are paying more per male doctor than per female doctor.

 
At 6/30/2010 6:02 PM, Blogger RaplhCramden said...

From that same data, women have a slightly higher GPA entering medical school than men. My recollection from my teaching days is that GPA is a better indicator of performance than are standardized tests.

 
At 6/30/2010 6:31 PM, Blogger RaplhCramden said...

An indicator that women were being preferred over men would be if the medical schools were willing to admit women who graduated at a lower rate than men. Looking at the graduate and enrollment data at http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/enrollmentgraduate/start.htm the best proxy we can think of for this is graduates/enrollment as the years go by. From this we see higher rates of graduation for women (21.6%) than men (20.8%) in 2009. It would appear admitted women have a slightly better chance of graduating than admitted men.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home