You’ve been tempted to bend the truth a little, maybe even outright lie on your medical school application in order to improve your chances. Can you get away with it? Is it worth it? Here’s what you need to know.
1 | Lying on Medical School Applications
Let’s start with the big one—outright lying on your primary or secondary medical school applications, which can be quite tempting.
There are many different ways you can lie on your application.
You could claim to have a publication when you don’t. You could add 1,000 hours to an extracurricular when you actually only clocked 200. You could completely make up an extracurricular experience. You could give yourself an important title when you didn’t have one. You could also misrepresent yourself by claiming you care deeply about diversity and inclusivity while posting hateful or bigoted rhetoric on social media.
There are myriad ways admissions committees can sniff out lies on your application, whether that’s through AI, checking your social media, or reaching out to their many contacts or your listed references. Keep in mind that medicine is a small world, and medical school admissions is an even smaller one. People talk.
If you are caught lying, you will be immediately black balled by the admissions committee, and it won’t stop just there. It will trickle down to other admissions committees because doctors will do everything they can to protect the sanctity of their profession.
Patients need to be able to trust their doctor, which is why ethics are taken so seriously in the medical profession. If one admissions committee catches you in a lie, they will do what they can to ensure you are not accepted anywhere. A bad egg slipping through the cracks tarnishes the reputation of doctors everywhere and makes it harder for them to do their job.
Remember the career you’re trying to get into. Being a doctor means having integrity and an ironclad code of ethics. Integrity is one of the core principles of the profession. If you’re resorting to these tactics, you should reflect on whether or not you’re entering the right profession. You can’t betray the core foundations of a profession in order to get into it and expect everything to work out.
But what if you get away with the lie? What if no one notices? This doesn’t mean the lie is just swept under the rug. The lie will never go away, whether everyone knows about it or just you. And that inauthenticity will eat at you – imposter syndrome will find you for good reason, and you’ll wonder if you got into medical school and deserve a seat based on your own merits, or because you bent the truth.
Depending on the lie, you may have to keep up with the lie for as long as you want a career in medicine, let alone the application process. Lying will make it even more difficult on yourself during interviews. You won’t be able to be your authentic self, and humans are incredibly sensitive at sniffing out inauthenticity and deceit. After all, this was key during our evolutionary history, and attempts to maintain the lie during the interview will almost certainly show.
Taking an extra year to build up your experiences is a much, much better solution than lying on your medical school application.
2 | Plagiarizing on Medical School Applications
Plagiarizing is a form of lying; however, it’s not only lying, it’s also stealing. You’re taking something that doesn’t belong to you, something you didn’t work for and earn yourself.
In terms of your medical school application, plagiarizing is most likely to come up in your essay—notably, your personal statement. There are tons of personal statement examples out there, which means it would not be difficult to take one and tweak it to make it your own. However, this completely defeats the purpose of a personal statement and will put you at a disadvantage.
Your personal statement is your story. It’s an admissions committee’s window into who you are beyond your grades and achievements. Using another person’s story misrepresents who you are.
Now, it’s perfectly okay to take inspiration from others, and we encourage you to do so. Read examples of successful personal statements to better understand what admissions committees look for. We have multiple free resources that you’ll find highly valuable, including breakdowns and commentary from admissions committees on each personal statement.
Plagiarizing does not work to your benefit, as you’ll be telling someone else’s story instead of your own again and again during the course of your secondary applications, interviews, and beyond. Not only is this difficult to do, it could actually make you sound more generic and forgettable.
It’s difficult to stand out from the thousands of other students applying alongside you and even more difficult to stand out from the tens upon tens of thousands of candidates who applied in the years before you. The more you copy someone else’s story and voice, the more bland you become. The best way to stand out is to tell your own unique story.
Plus, it’s very likely you will be caught at some point. Admissions committees have AI technology designed to catch plagiarism, and it gets better every year. It’s also quite possible that someone on the admissions committee could recognize something or know the person you’re plagiarizing. And remember, medical school admissions is a very small world.
3 | Exaggerating on Medical School Applications
Your grades and transcripts are pretty much set in stone, so you aren’t able to lie about those things. Exaggerating usually occurs in the Work and Activities section or in your other essays, like your personal statement.
You may say you participated in extracurriculars that you didn’t or claim to have played a bigger role than you did in one activity or another. For example, if you were shadowing a surgeon and say you sutured the skin closed or intubated a patient as an undergrad, that’s either untrue or it’s a safety risk. Doctors know these kinds of things, so it’s a clear sign you’re being disingenuous.
Exaggerating may be hard to catch, but it doesn’t make it right. Being a few hours off here or there won’t matter, but be sure to accurately record your hours and experiences as best you can throughout your premed years in a journal so that you can paint a clear picture of your actual accomplishments.
Admissions committees are not dumb. If you’re claiming 1400 hours here, 2000 hours there, and 2500 somewhere else, they are going to notice the impossibility of your claims.
Admissions committees have seen hundreds if not thousands of applications, and they applied to medical school once too. They can see through what’s authentic and what’s bloated exaggeration. They’ll start to question how it’s possible you were able to collect so many hours in so many different areas.
It’s okay to round up. If you were 1 of 48 vying for a scholarship, you could round up to 1 of 50. But if you claim you were selected out of thousands when only a hundred applied, they will find out.
If you don’t have a published article, don’t say you do. You can say it was submitted, but you can’t say it was published if it wasn’t. They will notice because they will simply look up your publication. And if you get to the interview stage, many interviewers will grill you on your research and submitted work.
Admissions committees do not want to accept candidates who think it’s okay to lie to get ahead. If they think you’re being disingenuous, they will use everything at their disposal to figure out if you’re lying. They’ll use AI tools, social media, and their many, many contacts to find the truth. These are expert humans with experience on their side.
Plus, it’s also important to remember that you generally don’t see your letters of recommendation before they’re sent to the admissions committee. If what you claim on your application doesn’t line up with what the letter writer said about you, that’s another huge red flag.
Medical school admissions committees have a zero tolerance policy on lying, and significant exaggerations certainly constitute lying.
4 | Poorly Utilizing AI Writing Technology
So far, admissions committees haven’t said you can’t use AI technology to help write your essays, but this could change in the future. Be sure to check each school’s specific instructions to see what is allowed and what isn’t. Always follow a school’s rules and instructions. If you disagree or are tempted to violate these rules, you’re likely not an ideal fit for that medical school.
If you are allowed to use AI writing tools, should you? And in what capacity?
While it can make writing easier, it’s to your ultimate disadvantage to use AI to write your essays entirely, especially if you don’t have ample experience with prompt engineering. These tools are only as good as the information they have.
We covered this topic in a previous article on the Future of AI and Medical School Applications.
Like any new piece of technology, AI writing tools like ChatGPT take time to master. You need to practice using the tool and train it to do what you want it to. If you have a passion for learning new technologies or have already spent ample time learning how to master the tool, this could be an option for you.
Without providing the AI tool with extensive and detailed background information about yourself as well as your experiences, key moments in your life, and notable traits, even though the writing may sound good, it won’t be your unique story.
For most students, writing your personal statement and other essays yourself will result in a stronger product because it will be in your own words. A personal statement must come from your own unique voice. The strongest applicants utilize their personal statement as an opportunity to further the overall narrative of their application—something AI tools can’t do just yet.
Don’t think you’ll be able to plug in a few descriptors of yourself and have an AI tool plop out an engaging, authentic personal statement in your own unique voice.
If you want to use AI to help write your essays, it’s best to use it for brainstorming, synthesizing ideas, and organizing information. Use AI to help spark ideas and improve your writing if it is something you struggle with, but ensure you keep your voice your own.
Your medical school application is far from the only time you will need to complete a writing assignment or cohesively weave ideas together. You’ll need to effectively craft your own answers on the fly during your interviews and throughout your medical education. Just as empathy or strong communication skills are sought-after traits in doctors and most professions, writing and the ability to craft a coherent and persuasive argument may also become one of those traits that set you apart from your peers.
Of course, at this early stage in the evolution of AI writing tools, we can only guess what the future will have in store. AI technology is still very new, and how it will impact the medical school application process will continue to evolve. Expect to see more information, guidelines, and restrictions in the coming years as programs adapt to the new technology.
Bottom line: Don’t use AI tools if a school implements guidelines against them, and don’t view these tools as an easy way out of your essays. Your concern should not be about how quickly you can write your essays; your concern across your whole application should be authenticity and integrity.
Begin Your Career With Integrity
If you’re going against the core values of what it means to be a doctor before you even get into medical school, that’s a big problem. Breaking the rules of the medical profession to become part of it invalidates and disrespects its core values and shows admissions committees why you should not join their medical school instead of the other way around.
Even if you were able to fool someone else, you can never fool yourself. And your sense of self, including your self-worth and self-esteem, is ultimately the reputation you have with yourself. For your own self-interest, and to maintain your sanity, integrity, and self-respect, act in the way that you would be proud to tell others. Because whether or not you tell others, you’ll always know the truth. And you can’t ever escape that.
With social media, it’s hard not to play the comparison game. You may feel pressured to bend the truth here or there to be more competitive when it seems like everyone is scoring a 520 on the MCAT and has a perfect 4.0 GPA. Understand that’s not the truth, and this is a prime example of survivorship bias.
We’ve even helped students with below average GPAs and MCAT scores get into competitive medical schools. Your stats aren’t your whole application, and what you consider blemishes or embarrassing shortcomings can actually be used to your advantage if you know how. It all comes down to how you spin things, what you’ve learned from the challenges, and the overall narrative that your application presents to the admissions committees.
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