Our selection procedure aims to be fair, open and transparent to all applicants. In this highly competitive field, the success of any application depends on its strength relative to all the other applications.
In summary, the procedure is as follows:
- First, we check your UCAS form to see whether you meet our academic criteria.
- Next, your form is read by a trained HYMS assessor and scored out of 50.
- We add in your UKCAT result (scored out of 10) to give a combined score out of 60.
- We rank all applications using this combined score and invite between 400 and 500 applicants to interview.
- At interview, two interviewers will independently evaluate your answers, giving an average score out of 50.
- We then combine your interview, UKCAT and UCAS scores into one final score.
- We rank everyone again using this final score, and make offers to about the top 300 students.
All applications are given full consideration, irrespective of the applicant's age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, marital or parental status, religion, social class, nationality, ethnic origin, or area of UK residence.
We and our parent universities are committed to a programme of widening access to higher education. Our admissions process selects applicants on the basis of their potential, and we will take account of evidence of educational, social, health or other personal disadvantage.
Details of our selection procedure
Selection for medical school implies selection for the medical profession. All medical school admissions teams are tasked with selecting those applicants with the potential to be the best doctors. We are guided by current thinking on what makes a good doctor; for example, The Role of the Doctor Consensus Statement, agreed in 2008, outlines the unique combination of attributes and abilities doctors require. HYMS recognises the importance of a transparent and valid selection process and agrees with the Medical Schools Council's Guiding Principles for the Admission of Medical Students, revised in 2010.
When taking the decision to embark on a career in medicine, it is advisable to consider the range of different careers within the medical profession and the education and training these involve. The majority of UK medical graduates will go on to work as hospital doctors or in primary care for the NHS. Significantly, up to 50% will become general practitioners, providing comprehensive health care for the local community. There is a broad spectrum of careers across medical, surgical and other specialties, and it should be noted that whilst many of these specialties have historically been hospital-based, healthcare is moving towards a more community-centred model of delivery and consequently doctors will increasingly be expecting to deliver healthcare in a range of settings.
All UCAS forms that meet our academic criteria are read and scored by a trained HYMS assessor. We consider your personal statement and your reference together as one document. We don't consider unsolicited references or any additional information, except for evidence of mitigating circumstances.
Using a standard assessment sheet, we score your UCAS form out of a maximum of 50 points. We assess the level of evidence you provide for each of the following personal attributes:
- academic ability
- motivation for medicine
- a realistic understanding of medicine, including hands-on experience of caring and observing healthcare in hospital and community settings
- self-motivation and responsibility
- communication skills
- ability to work with others
- other unusual qualities or life-experience
When writing about your work experience, we look not only for a list of what you've done but also for your reflections on what you learned about yourself, or the medical profession, from that experience.
Our selection procedure ensures that any declared disability or criminal conviction is not allowed to influence the UCAS form assessment.
If we find out that any of the information on your UCAS form is untrue or misleading, you may forfeit your offer or place at HYMS.
All our applicants must take the UKCAT in the year they apply. We award you a number of points depending on your UKCAT score, and add this to the points from your UCAS form to give the total score which we use to rank you against other applicants.
Details of how we will do this in 2012 will be available in the spring.
We rank all applicants in order of their total score (out of 60), and we invite between 400 and 500 applicants to interview.
You will normally be interviewed by two people, typically one female and one male, one of whom is typically an experienced clinician. Your interviewers will not have seen your UCAS form, because the interview explores different attributes that are not well assessed from a written application.
Your interview will last about 20 minutes. It will be formally structured, with a fixed number of questions. One question will be based on an article that you will be given to read immediately beforehand. The article will be short and non-technical, of the type you might find in a broadsheet newspaper.
The other questions will explore the following attributes:
- knowledge and understanding of problem-based learning
- motivation for medicine
- depth and breadth of interests, knowledge and reflection about medicine and the wider world
- teamwork and work experience
- personal insight -– knowledge of own strengths and weaknesses
- understanding of the role of medicine in society
- tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity
The two interviewers will independently evaluate each answer and score your interview out of 50. Their two scores are averaged to give your interview score.
After your interview, we add your interview score to the score we already had from your UCAS form and UKCAT. This gives your final total score. We then rank all applicants in order of their final total score and we make offers to about the top 300 scoring candidates.
Feedback
HYMS is a very popular medical school. We had over a thousand applications this year for just 130 places (plus 10 places for overseas students), so we have inevitably disappointed many people.
If you are unsuccessful in your application, we are happy to send you feedback. However, in line with the recommendations of the Schwartz report (September 2004), the only feedback we can provide is your numerical ranking in our scoring system. This is because our many excellent applicants are in fact competing against each other, and so we score applicants' relative strengths rather than their weaknesses. This also means we're usually not able to give specific advice on individual applications, except when the interviewers ask us to pass on specific feedback comments.
We will only be able to send feedback after February 2012, because of time pressures. To request it, you'll need to send us a letter, signed by you (not anyone else). We will write back only to your UCAS-registered address. We don't provide feedback in response to email or telephone enquiries. This is because of data protection issues -- we have to make sure that the information reaches only you and not any third party.
Please include your UCAS number in the letter and post it to the Admissions Office, Hull York Medical School, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD.
Adjustment, clearing and UCAS Extra
We are unlikely to enter adjustment, clearing or UCAS Extra.