Too early for a Medicine 2027 thread?

[SuperSue77]

Just wondered if there was any interest in a medicine 2027 thread for those of us with YP going into year 12 who plan to apply for medicine? I've seen one or two lurking previously and will try to tag if I can find their user names. Just conscious that I am always posting on the 2026 thread, yet DD is a year behind them and so my comments aren't so relevant.

Please come and join me here if you are interested.

Thanks! They now have 27 policy update on their website and no change. (Very relieved) He maxes out their scoring so don’t think any changes in thresholds will alter things now.

@mumsneedwine can I please get a copy of your spreadsheet- I’m particularly interested in courses that don’t need chemistry and also ones that give more weight to achieved academics rather than UCAT. It’s for a family friend who has no one to help advise in their school. Thanks so much!

@GracieZpop me a message with an email and I'll send it over. If anyone has any idea how I can store it and then give a link I'd love the help. I'm old !

Thanks so much!

Could I also please have a copy of the spreadsheet. I will drop you a pm @mumsneedwine

Hopefully all on their way. Have had a v kind offer to help me put it 'on line' so it will update as I do it.
Hope UCATs going ok - I really think it's a stinky exam !

As an update we are on our way but a slightly different direction. Dd has decided she’d prefer to do pharmacy so is planning where she wants to apply and is excited about what is ahead for her. Good luck to all your dc in their medicine applications it’s a journey this year 12/13 for sure! 😀

And I learnt I could get a refund on the UCAT was shocked by that!

@mumsneedwine

I would very much appreciate your spreadsheet please.

@Satisfiedwithanapple good luck to your future pharmacist!

Someone sent me this PDF report comparing med schools by GMC specialty pass rates... perhaps it can be useful when making the final selection. Good luck to all!

pdflink.to/ukmedschools/

You need to apply where your stats work to get you an interview. And this data is a bit useless as all you need is to be the person who passes the exams - doesn't matter what everyone else at your uni does.

PS before anyone accuses me of sour grapes, my DD went to Notts 😂

Of course, you're not a statistic. People can thrive anywhere. Selection must be strategic: focus first on your chances of getting in, then on open day visits and other available information. Specialty exam pass rates from the GMC are often overlooked because people tend to focus more on QS rankings, The Guardian, The Times, other guidebooks... or simply plain snobbery.

However, the stats don't like. A 61% average pass rate over five years (Exeter) means nearly 40% of students fail their specialty exams. Both teaching quality and curriculum clearly have room for improvement. With stats this consistent over time, it isn't just a matter of school age.

This wasn't meant to be a debate... it's just statistics. Do your own research, people.

Am I missing something but aren’t speciality exams sat several years after leaving med school, and so are really just a demonstration of how bright someone is? It would come as no surprise to us then that those scoring highest are those who also got into the med schools requiring the highest academic achievement to get there?

So it doesn’t really matter where our YP train to be doctors, they have the academic abilities they were born with and are going to achieve what they will on speciality exams regardless of where they learnt to be doctors?

Though my thoughts don’t explain why Exeter would be so low down given their standard offer is A*AA.

@SuperSue77 I’m pretty sure that there was a study link posted up thread in a post talking about how all med schools weren’t the same…
(there may have been an argument!)
When I gave it to chat gpt to read it basically said the study kind of disproved the point the poster of the link was trying to make. I got my robot to remember for me. Here you go!

”You’d given me studies while we were trying to make sense of the large differences in postgraduate medical exam pass rates between medical schools. The key papers we looked at included:

• A national MRCP study (PMC2244758).
• An MRCOG analysis.
• The large MedDifs national study (PMC7222458), looking at differences between UK medical schools.

The important conclusion we drew was essentially the one you remember: raw exam pass rates by medical school are heavily confounded by who those medical schools admit in the first place. Prior academic attainment was a very strong predictor of subsequent examination performance. So if Cambridge/Oxford recruit cohorts with exceptionally high prior attainment and then have higher postgraduate exam pass rates, you can’t simply infer that Cambridge teaching caused the difference. A substantial part of the difference appears to be the academic characteristics of the students entering the course.”

of course this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt as it could be wrong but I am not sciencey enough to be able to concentrate through the actual papers.

in the end it doesn’t matter anyway as you don’t get to take exams if you aren’t training to be a doctor. Priority should be applying to places you have a good chance of getting an offer from surely?

And just because 40% don’t pass doesn’t mean they never pass. They may just take a couple of goes at it. One of my kids’ friends has sat his maths gcse 3 times. No issue with their school teaching, he just finds maths really hard! But he will pass as he’s determined to.

And passing exams doesn't make you a good doctor. It just means you can pass exams. A better indicator is maybe who passes the OSCE part of each as this examines clinical and diagnostic skills, not just the regurgitation of knowledge. Can't be a doctor without that knowledge but just being able to spout it out on a random Thursday in a Pearson centre is not enough.

You need to get into Uni to be able to take those exams many years later so that's the focus right now.

I’m not sure it does particularly map with recruitment grades. Though there was another study recently that looked at success following degree/university/degree grade etc (any degree, not just medicine) and found the variation could nearly all be accounted for by A level grade.

Royal college exams often have a pass rate of between 30-50% on each sitting. And they cost £600+ each time (hopefully will now be funded for first 2 goes but not in law yet). They are mostly self marked so no one has any idea why they cost so much money 🫤

What is success ? Money ? Because I saw that study and apparently being a teacher, nurse, social worker for sexually abused kids do not count as success. Made me quite angry !

Me too, so much retoric about wages with regards to degrees. Doing a fulfilling and rewarding job that challenges you, makes you happy and makes a difference should be the end goal. Not a 6 figure salary.

I can’t remember. It could have been money, or a graduate level job. If money, poor though teachers, nurses and social worker salaries are, they are actually not that low compared with salaries and sporadic income in eg. The arts. It possibly was money as probably in the context of student debt.

It was money based. They got a lot of flack for it as was presuming all people want to feel successful is cash. An average teacher earns £45,000 which was in the lower end of their scale. Lawyers and bankers seem to be what they call success.

Anyhow, medicine doesn't really matter as pay scales are set unless you go private. Everyone earns the same base and the same extra for those very long days.

What Uni you go to doesn't determine what doctor you are or if you'll pass the RG exams. Getting in is tough and many fail because they don't apply strategically but through snob factor. Get a place, work hard, get into speciality training and then worry about all those extra exams. Which might have changed by the time this cohort do them.

Congrats to @hiyabean and @Zokaluse73’s YP with sitting their UCATs and their amazing scores!

Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet recently, DD did her UCAT on the 14th and didn’t do as well as she’d hoped. Maybe she should have delayed it but we left for a 2 week holiday 2 days later and when we’re back it’s pretty well straight back to school and personal statement, UCAS application, year 13 content and interview prep, so we thought it was better not to delay it.

It has impacted where she can apply - we think Exeter and UEA are off the table, it will depend on where the deciles land but given she was bang on last year’s average and they usually go up, I suspect she’s a bit too low now.

Fortunately she has put it behind her and been enjoying her holiday, but it’s never far from my mind and have been looking into the logistics of a trip up to Sunderland for their open day at the end of September.

Luckily Keele is still a possibility, which was always her favourite, but she will need to score top marks on her personal statement. And she only needs one! It would be good to get some other interviews though so that the Keele one won’t be her first, but it’s a bit of a toss up between choosing strategically to aim for interviews, albeit at med schools she doesn’t want to go to, versus choosing one or two risky ones she would love to go to.

I hope everyone else who has sat their UCAT now for the scores they were hoping for.

Getting in is tough and many fail because they don't apply strategically but through snob factor.

I often see that with St Andrew’s - when you see their options listed you can tell St Andrews was included for snob factor. I remember one person stating how St Andrew’s medical school dated back hundreds of years, as though this gave it higher status, but was oblivious to the fact that the historic St Andrews medical school has since the 1960s been called ‘Dundee Medical school’. Dundee doesn’t have the same snob factor!

(St Andrew’s medical faculty was established in 2002)