Anyone else's school's AOA really straight up odd? Like mine pools applicants based on ethnicity status so that certain groups are compared against themselves. Not to mention some arbitrary essays and students from the same class year making decisions on students in the same year (junior AOA deciding on senior AOA members). Hopefully programs see through this, AOA just seems to have lost its meaning over the past few years < Northwestern changed the way they decided AOA in an attempt to be more racially "equitable" [a.k.a. too many Asians and white students were getting AOA in past years]. It used to be based on being in top quartile, USMLE Step 1 score, and clerkship grades and a CV review. It's now changed to a more vague "holistic review." < AOA is such a joke. Always has been, only now people are starting to see it. I don't give a shit if an applicant/resident/attending was AOA in their class and neither should anyone else, including residency commitees. < A lot of Derm faculty (especially old school Derms) value AOA status, but this was before when at least academics was a much greater predictor on whether you got AOA or not. This new phase of "holistic review" likely came after the NPR article on AOA. < well AOA themselves changed their selection criteria so this isn't just on schools. Also a selection process that is only white and asian people across the country, annually, has to be inherently racist and was worth reevaluating < National AOA only changed the selection criteria in terms of the percentage allowed to be inducted. Racial disparity or disproportionality alone isn't evidence of racism. Grow up. < Statistical disparity does not and never has equaled systemic discrimination. To assume otherwise is a falacy. They can coincide, yes, but to automatically assume this destroys the argument. < my school had never had a black aoa member till last year. classmates argued well maybe no black person ever made the cut which is indeed an asinine comment but lets leave that for now. turns out that despite having at least one black student in the top 10% of our class every year for the past 10 years, they were either never nominated or had enough votes. So yes, we scrapped the system we had and revamped it. The AOA selection process in many schools was racist and biased. Argue amongst yourselves because it ain't coming back and I'm okay with that. < your comment just highlights even more how subjective and weird AOA is, and also further highlights some of your own inherent biases. The fact that "votes" are part of the selection process for this is weird enough as is.m < Oh great, the "woke" brigade from Derm Twitter has hopped in. "Wokeness" truly destroys everything. "because it ain't coming back and I'm okay with that." --- Of course you are. Not shocked there. What it will result in is PDs just going by class rank or the MSPE adjective instead.