Saturday, July 19, 2008

An Awesome COMLEX score

What is a "good" score on the COMLEX?

Anything above a 650 is considered very competitive, above a 700 means that you pretty much aced the thing.

Literally speaking, passing is good (means you understand/can apply the minimum amount of medical information necessary to practice medicine), beating the mean is a great score (meaning you beat over 50% of other test takers). Anything above that is gravy.

However, unfortunate though it may be, many programs unofficially (and somewhat illegally) prefer their applicants to have certain scores before they invite applicants for an interview. This is the harsh truth, helping the program directors sort through the deluge of applications they receive starting in late july/early august. More competitive specialties/programs "require" higher COMLEX scores than others. That being said, an application is more than a board score, so if your comlex score does not meet your imagined cutoff, don't let it stop you from applying everywhere you want to go.

Finally, I don't think anyone can honestly answer your question. If you have a question as to your competitiveness for a particular specialty, I would recommend talking to 4th years at your school who are applying in your chosen specialty - what are programs looking for this year. How high are their board scores, how many applications did they submit, how many interviews offers are they receiving? Are they looking at similar programs to those you are interested in?

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