How Advisors Sort a Medical School List When Schools Only Publish Medians (Worked Example)

Why Medicine Is Harder to Sort Than Law

Every ABA-approved law school publishes the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile of its enrolled class's LSAT and GPA in the same format, which is why a law list can be sorted by percentile. US MD schools have no equivalent standard disclosure. The AAMC's FACTS tables give national figures and per-school volume but no per-school MCAT or GPA, the paid MSAR database holds the per-school detail, and some schools publish a median or range in their own class profile. Of the 164 US medical school programs in AdmitBase, 28 have a median MCAT and GPA taken from the school's profile, and none of those has quartiles in our data.

So the working unit is the median, and the method changes: you measure the gap between the applicant and the median, and you accept that you cannot say how far from the middle the class extends.

Worked Example: A 512 MCAT and a 3.72 GPA

The medians below are each school's published figure from its own class profile. The tier comes from AdmitBase's match engine, which for a school with only a median estimates a program-typical spread around it; that estimate is why the tier is a guide, not a fact about the school.

Read it the way you would read a law table, with the median as the only landmark. Penn and Boston University are well above the applicant on both numbers. Georgetown is a couple of points and two hundredths away, a Reach rather than a Target because the applicant sits just below the median on both. Wayne State's MCAT median equals the applicant's score, but its GPA median is 0.16 higher. UC Davis and Buffalo are the two where the applicant is at or above the median on both numbers.

Why None of These Is a Safety

Even the schools in this table that publish an acceptance rate admit a small share of everyone who applies: 4.2% at Penn, 5.0% at Boston University and 9.7% at Wayne State. The two Targets do not publish a rate in their profiles, and a Target here means the applicant is at the median, not that the school is likely to admit them. AdmitBase will not label a school a Safety unless its modelled chance is at least 60%, and none of the six schools in this example reaches it.

That changes what an advisor should show. The question for a medical list is not which school is safe, it is how many applications give the applicant a reasonable chance of at least one acceptance. For that, use the national grid.

Anchor the List to the AAMC's National Grid

Table A-23 in the AAMC's FACTS tables reports what share of applicants in each MCAT and GPA band were accepted to at least one US MD school, aggregated over 2023-24 to 2025-26. For the applicant in this example, the 510–513 column of the 3.60–3.79 GPA row is 60.0%. The rest of that row:

Source: AAMC FACTS Table A-23, 2023-24 through 2025-26 aggregated.

Two readings matter. First, 60.0% is the best available picture of the applicant's chance of at least one acceptance, and it is a number the list has to earn: it reflects applicants who built lists of the usual size, which averaged 19.5 applications per applicant in 2025-26. Second, it does not tell you which schools. That is where the median table helps: it shows where in the list the realistic acceptances are likely to come from.

Residency: The Caveat the Medians Hide

UC Davis, Wayne State and Buffalo are public schools in California, Michigan and New York. The AAMC reports that 59.3% of 2025-26 matriculants enrolled in their home state, and a school's published median describes its whole class, residents and non-residents together. For an out-of-state applicant, a public school's Target is usually closer to a Reach than the table suggests, and our medical school list guide covers how in-state preference changes a list. This is a judgement call, not a published rule, and the school's own class profile is the place to check how many non-residents it enrolls.

Four Mistakes With Medians

• Treating the median as a cutoff. Half the class is below it. Applicants below the median are admitted every year.
• Reading a mean as a median. The AAMC's national figures are means (512.1 for 2025-26 matriculants); school profiles usually report medians. They are not interchangeable.
• Ignoring the profile year. A 2023 profile describes a class that applied two cycles ago. Prefer the latest year and note it.
• Using acceptance-anywhere as a school's rate. The A-23 cells are not any one school's odds. See acceptance rate, yield and matriculation rate for the three rates schools publish.

Run the Sort for Any Applicant

The medical school chances calculator scores an MCAT and GPA against every US medical school with published data, ranks them best fit first, and shows where a figure is only an estimate. For a whole advising caseload, see the advisor plan.