AAMC Reporter: March 2009
New Tools for Holistic Review
The AAMC is developing new tools intended to help medical schools
employ holistic review admissions principles.
"This will hopefully help remake the face of medical school,"
said Robert Witzburg, M.D., associate dean and director of admissions
at Boston University School of Medicine and a member of the AAMC
Advisory Committee on Holistic Review. "What will emerge from
this project will be a mix of conceptual ideas and concrete guidance
and support."
Holistic review is a process by which institutions assess all the
ways, beyond grades and test scores, that a medical school applicant
can contribute to a school's diverse educational environment. In
holistic review, an array of factors including student essays, community
service experience, and personal characteristics and background
information are taken into account along with grades and test scores.
Research has shown that a diverse student body will produce doctors
that are better equipped to treat the nation's increasingly diverse
patient population. A September 2008 article in the Journal of the
American Medical Association reported that white students at an
ethnically and racially diverse medical school were 33 percent more
likely to rate themselves as highly prepared to care for minority
patients than white students attending a less diverse medical school.
"Medical schools value diversity in every sense of the word
because of the educational benefits that accrue from a diverse class,"
said Henry Sondheimer, M.D., AAMC's senior director for student
affairs and student programs. "Students can become more culturally
sensitive to people who may have had different experiences."
According to experts, holistic review can help schools better achieve
greater student diversity. However, medical school administrators
have expressed a need for guidance on how to apply holistic review
principles, said Ruth Beer Bletzinger, special projects director
for AAMC's diversity policy and programs. For this reason, the AAMC
Holistic Review Project was created to help ensure the educational
effectiveness and legality of a school's admissions practices.
This spring and summer, the holistic review project will publish
two publications, one focusing on aligning admissions with institutional
mission and goals, and one focusing on enrollment management, which
helps individual medical schools shape the diversity of their student
body by aligning admissions practices with institutional mission
and other areas.
"Diversity is multi-dimensional and institution specific,"
Bletzinger said. "Each school has to decide for itself what
diversity means, and tailor its mission, educational interests,
the type of physicians it seeks to graduate, and other goals accordingly."
The project released its first resource, Roadmap
to Diversity: Key Legal and Educational Policy Foundations for Medical
Schools, in March 2008.
The University of Arizona School of Medicine and Drexel University
College of Medicine are aiming to apply holistic review principles
to their institutions during an ongoing two-year field test organized
by the AAMC. The two schools are currently assessing their student
diversity policies and will then revise their policies to align
them with their respective institutional goals and mission areas.
The University of Arizona College of Medicine serves a highly diverse
population in one of America's fastest growing states, said Linda
Don, M.Ed., assistant dean of minority affairs at Arizona's medical
school.
"We are a state-supported public institution," Don said.
"This places us in a position of special responsibility to
the many diverse communities of Arizona."
Drexel is using its participation in the project to find ways of
evaluating whether or how its holistic review efforts are producing
doctors who will enter primary care, practice in smaller communities,
and fulfill other components of the medical school's mission.
Drexel's administrators are revising the school's application to
include questions about an applicant's community service experiences,
said Anthony Rodriguez, M.D., Drexel's associate dean of student
affairs and diversity. Drexel faculty members hope to ultimately
determine whether a connection exists between the breadth of a student's
community service experience and the likelihood he or she will practice
in primary care. Changes to the application could happen as early
as September 2009.
On a national level, staff from the AAMC's American Medical College
Application Service (AMCAS) have sought counsel from the holistic
review advisory committee on ways they could help admissions officers
evaluate their applicants more holistically. AMCAS staff said that
no specific changes or timelines have been established, but that
plans for change could be developed as the application system is
reevaluated and reengineered over the next several years. The holistic
review advisory committee plans to engage educators about holistic
review at the AAMC Group on Student Affairs regional spring meetings.
—By Elissa Fuchs
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