Session 56 In this episode, Ryan breaks from what he usually does here on the podcast where he pulls up a questions directly from OldPreMeds.org forum as he talks about this HUGE announcement this past week from the AACOM that affects nontraditional students more than traditional students. Osteopathic medical schools are more favorable to non-traditional students, You may have struggled in the past, did poorly in undergrad or at a community college, gave up on your dream, only to find that passion again and want to try to fulfill that dream and become a physician. You've probably heard that as a nontrad applicant with poor grades in the past, applying to DO schools would be beneficial to you. Historically, that has been the case. NO MORE GRADE REPLACEMENT AACOMAS Application had a grade replacement policy for repeat coursework. However. effective May 1, 2017 (applying in 2017 to start school in 2018), AACOMAS will no longer replace your old grade with your new grade. As per AACOM.org: "Effective May 1, 2017, AACOMAS will include all course attempts in the GPA calculation. This change applies to students matriculating into the 2018-2019 academic year. In the event of multiple attempts of the same course, AACOMAS will no longer drop initial course attempts from the GPA calculation." Read full notice on AACOM.org Here are the insights from Ryan: This will affect a lot of you who are currently in school retaking classes because you were going to rely on this grade replacement policy. The American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM) did you wrong. If they were planning this policy change, they should have given you a transition period so students currently in school and in the process of repeating classes would have 2-3 years to apply to use the grade replacement policy before it changed. If you applied in 2016 to start in 2017 but you didn't get into medical school, when you reapply this year, your GPA will change according to the new policy assuming you had repeated coursework. The Silver Lining Osteopathic medical schools may continue recalculating weighing your GPA per established admissions practices. Problem: This puts the work onto each of the medical schools which have a lot of work to do to begin with. They usually have filters in place where they can filter out based on a GPA cutoff or MCAT cutoff. If you're a student where your GPA is going to drop from, say 3.6 to 2.6, guaranteed, your 2.6 is going to be filtered out. Solution: Advocate for yourself and speak out to the medical school and ask them to consider taking a look into your application. Major takeaway from this episode: If this is affecting you, keep your head up. Just keep doing well. Advocate for yourself. If this is truly what you want to do, you'll make it work. Links and Other Resources: Read the actual notice from AACOM. Check out the Specialty Stories podcast on www.medicalschoolhq.net