HSFY 2019

[frootloop]

Someone might be able to find out more information regarding HSFY but this might help:
New Zealand Rural Origins sub-category - a Official Information Act request to University of Otago

There seems to be 55 seats each year for rural applicants with 9-15 of those seats going to graduates so the rest for HSFY.

From memory, the number of seats for the rural and Māori categories each year are a little fluid - while 55 sounds about right on average, I wouldn't bet on it being exactly 55 each year

Also, they tend to bump people who would have gotten in anyway off the subcategory lists and put them in the general pool. So that 55 is 55 people who wouldn't have gotten in anyway, which expands the subcategories a little.

 

[Elmo23]

I've heard that you only need to pass a threshold for UCAT for medicine this year, and then if you pass the threshold your top 7 paper average for HSFY determines your rank. Seems harsh to the people in previous years who had amazing averages but missed out to UMAT

 

[Glorious_Squid]

Watch that rank score jump somewhere, over the rainbow, way up high...

 

[Elmo23]

I honestly think they should just scrap the UCAT and base it fully on HSFY gpa as there are many reasons to do so, not saying others can't argue the opposite way just as well. This way everyone can battle to get high 90s. I personally think anyone who can get a 92+ average deserves a free spot into medicine, but still go for a 95+ avg regardless of what you might think you need. I personally predict the cutoff will be around 93-94% but don't take my word for it as I have no idea what HSFY is like now, and regardless of what the cutoff will be you definitely will have to try your best anyway. My advice to everyone will be to try to do the best out of everyone, so you don't worry about the cutoff but focus on executing your best gpa. Since this is the first year HSFY has been like this you all have a chance to shoot for the stars and set records

 

[jaejoong]

I wonder if the threshold is overall or for each of the 5 sections... still think there's a possibility of people with amazing averages but missed out due to the UCAT...
all we can do is to do our best

 

[Amadeus]

Does anyone know what grades someone who's aiming for med should be getting in the progress (midterm) tests? How many questions can we get wrong?

 

[rustyedges]

Does anyone know what grades someone who's aiming for med should be getting in the progress (midterm) tests? How many questions can we get wrong?

The midterms are only a small part of your overall grades, but probably do tend to correlate to the final marks, so you should be aiming for as high as you can, i.e. 100%. But getting over 90% is still very good.

 

[Glorious_Squid]

Anyone know when midterm results usually come out?

 

[academedical]

Anyone know when midterm results usually come out?

Depends on the paper. HUBS and CELS are pretty good at getting marks back within 2 weeks, I think CHEM was slower. Next semester you'll find PUBH takes 2-3 time longer than any other paper to get results back lol

 

[frootloop]

(I apologize in advance for what I've just realised looks rather like I'm torching your post line by line haha)

Since this is the first year HSFY has been like this you all have a chance to shoot for the stars and set records

I'm going to go out on a limb here. I genuinely do not think this will affect the HSFY grades you need to get in all that much.

Because not that many seats actually changed hands because of it.
Gasp.

It was very rare to miss out on medicine if you had a very high HSFY average. MSO usually attracts one every second year or so. Similarly rare to 'jump the queue' and get in with an average under about 87. I've literally met one or two of these in total.

Which meant that UMAT only really affected the people within that ~87-93 range. The 'UMAT susceptibility zone'. So, even if UMAT massively altered the ranking order, it wouldn't have huge room to change the cut-off. Which it doesn't really, because:

A) The 2/3 : 1/3 weighting
First up, HSFY averages were weighted double what your UMAT raw score was. Double the impact anyway - to counterbalance a 3% difference in HSFY grades you'd need a UMAT raw score difference of 6 (which is what, 10 or so percentiles?).

B) Overlapping scores
It's also worth noting that at a cohort level, UMAT scores are actually pretty strongly positively correlated with academic grades. Which reduces the effect of removing UMAT on the overall ranking of candidates. Yes, there's the stories you always hear of someone with a 97% HSFY average and a 0-24th %ile UMAT, but those are more rare than they're made out to be.

Tbh I have my doubts removing UMAT would change the HSFY grade requirements by more than 2%. So by way less than the other variables which routinely change the cut-off. Things like the exact balance of grads to undergrads, exact number of Māori and rural applicants etc each year.

Buuuut this is all academic. Because we've obviously never calculated a 'HSFY grades cut-off', because it's never been a thing before. It'll be impossible without the university's full applicant datasets to know whether the GPA shifts from this year on.

I honestly think they should just scrap the UCAT and base it fully on HSFY gpa as there are many reasons to do so, not saying others can't argue the opposite way just as well.

So I'm going to take 'not saying others can't argue the opposite way just as well' as a personal challenge.

While I actually quite like UMAT (which may be at least a little biased by what helped me over the line), I've proposed something similar in the past. It sounds sort of instinctively reasonable, doesn't it?

And one hand, the best predictive factor for medical school performance is prior academic performance. While this isn't surprising (academic performance predicts academic performance, shocker). So yes, as far as the limited evidence for medical school performance goes, using only grades sounds pretty good.

But.

1. I kept saying 'medical school performance' for a reason. That reason being evidence for predicting 'who will be a good doctor' would require a widely-agreed and measurable definition of 'a good doctor'. So whether it's actually all that important to 'doctor quality' to be able to get a 95% HSFY average is debatable.

It also almost certainly isn't a linear association. While you need a certain level of academic aptitude - and much more so a capacity to retain huge volumes of information - it probably doesn't make much difference whether you're 'just smart' or Steven Hawking.

So do you need to be able to score over 70% in all the papers to get through medicine?
Probably.
Will someone who gets a 90% health sci average do better in medicine than someone who only just got those 70%s?
Possibly.
Does a 98% HSFY average indicate you'll be a better doctor than someone with a 92% one?
Very unlikely.

It's also interesting to stop looking at it just as a competition. Say instead, you were setting an academic bar, and every single person who cleared it would get a medical school seat (regardless of whether that meant 5 people or 500 got in).

Would you be able to justify setting it at 95%? Or, on what grounds would you increase it from it's current ~91% up to, say 95%?

2. While academic performance is the single best predictor, so far as I know we don't have very good evidence regarding overall selection systems. That said, I'd be willing to bet that a combination system of some form would produce a more diverse, well-rounded and probably 'better suited to medicine' cohort than grades alone.

3. In the interest of both social justice and fairness to individual applicants, entry to medical school should be equitable. If the process was completely equitable, then a beginning medical school class would more or less reflect the ethnic/social group and economic-background distribution of the underlying population.

As such, if a second year medical school class was, say, entirely white males from families in the top 10% household earnings (i.e. if this was Otago in the 90's), you'd suspect that maybe the selection process wasn't entirely equitable.

This is one of the few criticisms I have of HSFY as a selection system is its socioeconomic fairness to applicants.

It's obviously significantly better than the 'straight out of high school' systems. At least everyone is taught the same content over the same time period and sits exactly the same exams, which helps to minimize the effects of systemic dis/advantages. But it's only a year out of high school, which isn't enough to make all of the inequalities in quality of schooling, parental/community attitudes to academia etc just go away.

The effects of those inequalities is obviously pretty high at the sharp end of the competition. And the cut-off is already incredibly high, so it'd be hard to justify making that worse.

But more importantly, a test like UMAT adds an extra selection variable - one which is likely less susceptible to the effects of those inequalities (due to the evidence against the efficacy of paid preparation). Or at least, probably not exactly the same effects in exactly the same way.

 

[Verdigris]

I was going to say - UCAT was introduced in the UK so that there was a way for students of lower socioeconomic status to gain entrance to medical school when they didn't have the same benefits of their peers who could afford things like better schools, textbooks, private tuition etc. UCAT is specifically created to have as many preparation tools available for free as possible so that students who can pay money can't have too much of an advantage. In my case, UMAT did not help me with entrance due to the threshold rather than weighted system for graduate entrants.
I personally think that Otago should also introduce interviews, but that's a whole different kettle of fish

 

[jaejoong]

HUBS results are out... let's see how long my self-control lasts (trying to not check my grades until I've completed all my mid-terms)

 

[Elmo23]

I personally think that Otago should also introduce interviews, but that's a whole different kettle of fish

Thinking about the selection process more makes me so confused on what's right and wrong, but I'll just have a yarn anyways I feel like interviews are more prone to subjective ranking compared to gpa and umat/ucat, because even if interviews were only used for a tie breaker between 2 candidates, the person who makes the best impression on the interviewers of showing important skills, that aren't assessed in HSFY and UCAT, such as communication skills will gain entrance into med based on the opinions of a small number of people. This may lead to some bias based on the interviewers forming an idea of each persons personality over a very short period of time which could be accurate or inaccurate based on how the applicant is feeling at that particular time. Similarly with UCAT being a 2 hour long test. I don't feel as though a 2 hour test should make or break your chances of attaining your desired course which is why I don't like the cutoff rule, since you can only sit the test once a year. Also, with UMAT being worth 1/3 of the entrance criteria for Otago Med in HSFY in past years is also a bit high as it was only 3 hours long, and potentially how you felt during that small time period could make a potentially significant difference in you're overall rank(for example if you happened to physically or mentally ill on the day of umat). I prefer how Auckland uses 15% rank based on umat (not sure if they do the same for ucat) because even a <50th%ile umat/ucat can be much more easily made up for with a good gpa if umat/ucat is worth 15% instead of 1/3. If it was my choice (which it is definitely not), I would base anywhere from 75-85% on gpa and 15-25% on ucat due to the fact that for me more than 90% of my effort into trying to get into med was focused towards my gpa but at the same time, there are other desirable qualities that are not assessed in HSFY but in UCAT which for a 2 hour test I feel anywhere from 15-25% is ideal as this is still a significant amount, yet at the same time does not completely rule you out as the idea of people working hard during HSFY for approximately 4800hrs (2 semesters) to get a good gpa and have that effort mean nothing due to a 2hr test outside of the academic university course is unfair. Since this is the real world though, the best thing you hsfyers can do now is adapt to what is required rather than what you wish was required to get into med

 

[mr_fanstadic]

How do you study efficiently for health sci? I don't have any free time and Im always behind? What are some good ways people do this?

 

[cereal]

How do you study efficiently for health sci? I don't have any free time and Im always behind? What are some good ways people do this?

I think a lot of it depends on what way you're doing personal notes? I started this year being really behind all the time, and to a degree I think it's almost impossible to be fully on top of everything at university as there's pretty much always something you COULD be doing. Anyway, I was initially rewriting all of my notes by hand after lectures and even hand drawing diagrams in hubs and cels. This meant I was spent all of my free time just writing up notes, and had no time to do extra study at all. I've changed now to just writing in lecture for chem and adding anything I've missed afterwards, annotating slides in physics, and for hubs and cels I print diagrams from the slides to annotate in lecture but still rewrite my notes after. This has saved me a lot of time so I can actually do practice questions etc. but I still never feel fully on top of everything. I feel like it's ok to experiment a bit and just see what works for you? I still don't really know how to study hubs and cels because I've never been a flashcard person, but for chem and phsi it's just a case of doing as many practice questions as you can.

 

[jaejoong]

I agree, I fell into the same mistake of spending wayyy to much time on writing notes and then having no time to study them

 

[cereal]

Does anyone have any tips for learning hubs and cels content without the use of flashcards?

 

[jaejoong]

Does anyone have any tips for learning hubs and cels content without the use of flashcards?

If you mean memorizing without going through the hassle of making your own flashcards then using the headings of the lecture slides and recalling the points that are written under is a good way

 

[mr_fanstadic]

anyone has answers for hubs past papers?

 

[cashew]

Does anyone have worked answers/any answers for CHEM191 final exams? Cheers