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June 2002 Reporter

AAMC Strives for Improved AMCAS

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AAMC Strives for Improved AMCAS®

By Suria Santana

Following months of work by the AAMC's AMCAS team and a constituent advisory board, medical school applicants to the 2003 entering class may now begin filing their AMCAS applications via the Web. At press time, more than 10,000 individuals had initiated AMCAS 2003 applications via the site.

The Web-based medical school application service has undergone a series of upgrades and enhancements, including the addition of several servers designed to make the application process speedier, easier, and more reliable for both students and medical schools.

The 2003 Web application required these significant refinements following the service's substandard performance in 2001. When AMCAS 2002 was launched last year, the application was plagued with technical "bugs," and was slow to respond online. Other technical problems included slow and incorrect data transmission to medical schools' admission offices, creating a regrettable and frustrating admissions cycle for applicants, schools, and the AAMC, acknowledged Pamela Cranston, Ph.D., associate vice president in the AAMC's Section for Student Services.

"As a result of the AMCAS 2002 crisis, the AAMC Office of Information Resources (OIR) significantly expanded its testing resources and personnel," says Dr. Cranston. "The application went through several types of technical testing over a two-month period."

Testing was not limited to AMCAS and OIR personnel, however. Undergraduate pre-medical students from around the country also played an important role in efforts to boost the performance of AMCAS. Close to 100 students, dubbed the student "beta testers" by the AMCAS team, completed the entire online application, printed it out, and mailed it to the AAMC. They later filled out an online survey of their experience, with the application. "We paid each of them $100 for their services," says Dr. Cranston. "They found a few bugs, which were later fixed, and made some good suggestions for clarification of instructions."

The AMCAS 2003 application includes several new features, such as an online "dynamic welcome page" that shows applicants their applications' status. A new 24-hour Voice Response System allows applicants to get information about their applications over the phone as well. In addition, "telecheck" has been added to the online credit card option so applicants may pay online by either check or credit card.

Another new feature makes the lives of returning applicants, about a third of the applicant pool, much easier. "We've rolled over last year's application," explains Dr. Cranston. "So now, re-applicants only have to update their applications, rather than start from scratch as they did for the last 30 years."

Steven Case, Ph.D., M.S., associate dean for admissions at the University of Mississippi School of Medicine, says that he has received very positive feedback from students whose 2002 appli- cations were rejected and who are planning to re-apply this year. "There have been ear-to-ear grins when I tell them that when they log-in to AMCAS 2003 and use the same log-in conditions and AAMC ID number from last year, their 2002 data will appear," says Dr. Case. "There hasn't been a person who was unhappy with that."

Despite the troubles AMCAS 2002 posed, Doug Taylor, assistant dean for Admissions and Records at East Tennessee State University James H. Quillen College of Medicine, hopes the application's performance will improve. "The AMCAS team has worked hard to fix this application's problems, and they've come a long way," says Taylor. "The situation was indeed very difficult for the applicants, the schools, and the association itself."

Dr. Cranston says that although AMCAS 2003 includes several technical improvements, it is still a work in progress. She warns applicants that they need to be patient with the Schools Attended, Course Work, and GPA sections of the application. "These parts of the application have quite a bit of database interaction," she explains. "Whenever applicants enter new information, there's an update to the database. Then, when they enter additional information, there's another update. There are lots of these sequences in these portions of the application, and these updates take time." AMCAS developers have done some enhancements to the database to accelerate this process, but it hasn't been possible to speed it up as much as they wished. "The number one priority for next year's application is to redesign these sections so that they run even faster," Dr. Cranston adds.

As a precautionary measure, the AAMC is keeping AMCAS back-up systems in place for schools. "We will continue to print and mail processed, verified AMCAS applications to schools for one more year," explains Dr. Cranston. "We will also make available a second type of e-file for schools that can't access or don't want the standard type of e-delivery of their data."

Overall, schools and applicants should expect a much better experience with AMCAS this year, predicts AAMC President Jordan J. Cohen, M.D. "We are confident that we are in a position to provide both applicants and schools a satisfactory experience this year. We have not only thoroughly tested the software and beefed up the infrastructure; we also have a team in place that has proven its capability to deal with any bumps in the road, should they occur. Our goal in the coming years is to re-establish AMCAS as nothing less than higher education's premier centralized application service."