Monday, July 2, 2001

Glitches Turn New Online Medical-School Application Into a Nightmare By KATHERINE S. MANGAN After several nights of wrestling with his online medical-school application, Amit Sachdeva was getting used to the routine: Stay awake until 2 a.m., when the cyber-traffic slows down; plod through a few pages until an error message appears; and get booted off the system. Then try several times to log on again and begin the process over, night after night. Estimated time for completion? "I'd say roughly 24 to 36 hours," the weary Yale University student recalls. "It was incredibly frustrating." His experience isn't uncommon. Across the country, medical-school applicants and their advisers are tearing their hair out over a new Web-based application that was supposed to make everyone's lives easier. The 2002 application, which can be used for 115 medical schools, is administered by the American Medical College Application Service, a centralized, nonprofit service that's run by the Association of American Medical Colleges. The Web-based version being offered for the first time this year was supposed to be more efficient than the old paper application. Instead, it's been plagued from the start by delays, computer bugs, and a seemingly endless succession of glitches. Students don't have the option of filing a paper application; they are required to use the Web-based form this year. The application is supposed to take five to eight hours to complete, but is taking most students at least twice that long, association officials acknowledge. It includes up to 90 screens, depending on how many forms the student has to fill out, and students say it often takes 5 to 10 minutes to move from one screen to the next. The association has been scrambling to respond to the complaints that have deluged its offices. Officials said last week that they hoped to have a few more servers up this month to ease the traffic jams. Computer servers are being reconfigured at a remote site, where they won't interfere with the traffic coming into the association's other servers. "The students are really uptight, and I can't say I blame them," says Robert Beran, the association's vice president for student affairs. "The application process is hyped enough as it is without these problems," he says. "I feel very bad for the students, and we're doing everything we can to alleviate the stress this is causing them." The biggest problem with the application, he says, is that "it's extraordinarily slow." That's not news to Erwins Benitez, a City University of New York student who's been slogging through the application late at night, while his infant son sleeps. He had to punch in his phone number about 20 times before the computer would accept it. "The way it's going, it's going to take me about 30 hours to finish," he says. A career adviser at Yale calls the online application "an unmitigated disaster." "I had a student this morning tell me that he wasted six hours trying to enter four terms of grades and then received an error report followed by his computer freezing," says Edward J. Miller, director of Yale's Health Professions Advisory Program. That's a nuisance for students with their own computers, but an expensive headache for others, he says. Students who are living outside the United States or studying abroad pay up to $1 a minute in charges to Internet-service providers, Mr. Miller says. The application that everyone's groaning about is for study beginning in the fall of 2002. It might seem like much ado about nothing, given that the entry date is so far off. But the medical-school admissions process is notoriously lengthy, and the cutthroat competition makes medical students more prone to panic if their applications are delayed. Here's how the cycle usually runs. The centralized applications distributed by the medical association are available on April 1 -- more than a full year before students enter -- and students can begin submitting them on May 1. The association processes the applications, and the information is forwarded to the schools the student has selected. The schools then send out their own, individualized applications. Student interviews are conducted in August or September. Early-decision applicants are often accepted in August, and students can usually apply for regular admission until October. The bugs in the system this year have delayed the whole process by about three to four weeks. As if that weren't bad enough, no sooner had the system begun accepting applications than a three-day electrical failure paralyzed a section of Washington that includes the association's headquarters. Some premedical advisers worry that the resulting delays could hurt minority or low-income students. "The medical schools will be so backed up they'll be flying through the applications and cutting kids on the cusp, which is where a lot of minority and disadvantaged kids are," says Mr. Miller. An administrator at the City University of New York says many of her students don't own computers. "I've given my key to students so they can use my office in the middle of the night to work on the application," says Lolita A. Wood-Hill, who directs CUNY's premedical program. Association officials who have sent surveys to potential medical students say they're convinced the Web-based application isn't putting anyone at a disadvantage. Most students own computers, and those who don't can use one at a library or university, they say. That would be fine, critics say, if students could complete the application in a couple of hours, but tying up a library computer for 15 hours or more isn't realistic. Not everyone is pressing the panic button, however. The University of Kentucky College of Medicine is pushing its admissions timetable back by a month, but doesn't expect any big problems. "Normally we start interviewing students in August, but we'll probably delay that until September," says Carol L. Elam, assistant dean for admissions. "We recognize that this is a new system and there are going to be glitches." CUNY's Ms. Wood-Hill says she's been dismayed by all the bugs in the system. The association "sends us e-mails every day to tell us what blew up today," she says. "It's nice to be updated, but I wish these problems would be fixed." Mr. Beran, the association official overseeing the process, predicts "a dramatic improvement" over the next few weeks, when the new servers are up. In the meantime, the association is preparing a paper application, just in case the glitches can't be ironed out. "We're not going to leave anyone hanging." Background article from The Chronicle: Bugs Delay Web-Based Applications for 115 Medical Schools (5/11/2001) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

Education Dept. officials promise to clarify rules on student-recruitment incentives Campus executives back away from Knight commission report on college athletics Alabama Supreme Court rules that public schools and colleges must share budget cuts Stripper wins right to rejoin university's track team Glitches turn new online medical-school application into a nightmare House of Representatives seeks to close free bibliographic database The cat-and-mouse game of plagiarism detection Group releases free software for creating a virtual supercomputer  The queen of geek African professors learn online how to teach online