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.

• Medical Schools' Council guiding principles for the admission of medical students (pdf)

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 between 0 and 10 points depending on your UKCAT score, and add this to your form score to give you an initial score out of 60.

If you have a total UKCAT score of less than 1900 or a verbal reasoning score of less than 420, your application won't normally be considered.

If you have a total score of 1900 or higher, and a verbal reasoning score of 420 or higher, we will award you up to 10 points based on your total score, as follows:

Total UKCAT score	Points awarded
1900-2099	1
2100-2299	3
2300-2499	5
2500-2699	6
2700-2899	7
2900-3099	8
3100-3299	9
3300-3600	10

We rank all applicants in order of their initial score, and we invite the highest-scoring 600 to interview.

Also:

• If your UKCAT score was in the top 25%, but your initial score was below the threshold for invitation to interview, we will review your UCAS form again and we may decide to invite you to interview anyway.
• If your initial score is below the threshold for interview, a second assessor will normally re-check and re-score your UCAS form, and we'll then use the average of both readings to provide a revised initial score. If this is high enough to pass the threshold, we will invite you 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 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 a maximum of 50 points. Their two scores are averaged to give the your final interview points.

After your interview, we add your interview points (out of 50) to the initial score based on your UCAS form and UKCAT (out of 60). This gives your final total score (out of 110). We then rank all applicants in order of their final total score and we make offers to about the top 340 scoring candidates.