I knew I wanted to be a doctor when I was 7 years old.

I excelled in school, attended a good college, scored well on the MCAT, and was accepted into medical school just as I always knew I would be. It was only as I progressed in my career as a physician that I realized that being a white, middle-class individual had given me an advantage -- I had access that others did not. [MedPage Today]

There has been considerable talk about admitting more diverse students to U.S. medical schools, but not enough progress. In 2021-2022, U.S. medical school matriculants were 11.3% Black and 12.7% Latinx, not yet mirroring the total U.S. population at 14.2% and 18.7%, respectively.

Medical school admissions committees evaluate a medical school applicant's academic credentials and life experiences. Often, they strive for fairness by establishing scoring mechanisms applied evenly to all applicants. Fair, perhaps, but just -- not even close. "Fair" forgets that opportunity has not been equally distributed up to the point of a medical school application.

The MCAT, as used by most medical schools, is a major contributor to the educational injustice of the medical school application process. There remains an unexplained gap in average MCAT scores between white (503.1), Black (494.9), and Latinx (497.1) test-takers (Figure 7). This gap matters as 29% of applicants with a score of 502-505 are accepted compared to 10% with a score of 494-499 (Table 2). If we are serious about diversifying the physician workforce, we must rethink the way in which this examination is currently being used. Why? Because the unspoken MCAT line drawn by the majority of medical schools is keeping potential Latinx, Black, indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) students from attending; maybe even keeping potential students from applying.

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