I am a 24 year old non-trad, underrepresented minority applicant. I’m Mexican and Puerto Rican, and I’ve heard many conflicting statements regarding medical school evaluations of minority applicants. I checked Med-MAR when I registered for the MCAT. How do medical schools use Med-MAR? How do admissions committees view race and ethnicity when evaluating an applicant? If I have a solid GPA + MCAT combo, shadowing, research experience, etc. am I truly more likely to receive an interview, and then subsequently an acceptance for simply being a minority?
It seems like Medmar is purely a recruiting tool for schools to contact you directly. Note that I am NOT a URM and still received marketing stuff from some schools after the MCAT (no, i didn’t get a top score). It might be used during the application process as well, but I’m pretty sure all of the applications I filled out (maybe it was just the AMCAS primary) had a box or something to signify being a URM.
Student selection is going to be school/administrator dependent. All I can really tell you is that schools are very reluctant to accept someone who does not have a historically shown ability to succeed at med school and medicine. Simply being a minority won’t get you in the door if you aren’t otherwise qualified. I couldn’t tell you how they would view an “over” vs “under” applicant if they were both somehow truly equal in every other way. I can’t comment on any sort of “quota” system, but most schools seem to publish class demographics, so take that as you will. What I can say is that part of the LCME accreditation requirements includes student diversity and cultural training. I don’t really know what the specifics are to meet those requirements.
Keep in mind that there is generally a lower threshold of what it means to be “qualified” than the SDN version of what it takes to be a doctor. A person who has a 40 MCAT is not necessarily going to be a “better doctor” than a person with a 28 (old scale, sorry). That’s based on some evidence that above a certain score cutoff, you’re more likely to complete medical school. As with all things in life though, the better you do, the better it looks (on paper). The whole holistic approach attempts to weed out the robots from the humans…
As a total generalization, schools are looking to diversify the classroom demographics both to increase the demographics of medicine and to promote better understanding of people different than the way you grew up before you’re tasked to treat a population that you may not be accustomed to.
All that being said, if your application is solid regardless of the color of your skin and your heritage, then you should expect to at least receive interview invites. After that, the interview will have a pretty major factor in whether or not you get in.