Abstract

Intro: In this study, we sought to answer the following questions:

What is the post-interview invite acceptance rate for medical school applicants in Canada?
Do students who pay for medical school interview preparation achieve higher rates of post-interview acceptance than those who do not?

Methods: We calculated the per-cycle, post-interview acceptance rate for all interview invitees at every English-speaking medical school in Canada using publicly available data from official sources from the 2024-2025 admission cycle. We then calculated the per-cycle, post-interview acceptance rate for students who had worked with Canadian Premed for interview preparation over the past 2 years.

Results: Across all Canadian English-speaking medical schools, 8403 interview invites were sent out for 2709 medical school class seats during the 2024-2025 application cycle. Therefore, the pooled per-cycle, post-interview acceptance rate for 2024-2025 was 32.2% (2709/8403). The per-cycle, post-interview acceptance rate of students who worked with Canadian Premed over the last 2 years was 70.5% (n = 71). None of the students who had worked with Canadian Premed and gained acceptance to medical school used our services for more than 1 application cycle.

Discussion: Our study is the first of its kind to report on post-interview-invite acceptance rates for English-speaking medical schools in Canada. This study inherently controls for waitlist movement across all medical schools included. Our high rate of non-imputed data (76%) and handling of missing data represent a methodologically robust analysis. This study was limited to Canadian, English-speaking medical schools only.

Conclusions: Our results suggest that our students were 2.19x more likely to receive an acceptance to medical school, post-interview invite, compared to the general pool of medical school invitees in Canada (70.5%/32.2% =2.19).

Introduction

Medical school admissions consulting companies that advertise their interview preparation services typically cite extraordinarily high rates of post-interview acceptance (e.g., 90% or higher) for their previous students. These rates are in stark contrast to the Canadian national average of 32.2% (Table 1). This discrepancy raises skepticism about the validity of their claims and their statistical methodologies. For example, some companies report their “success rate” over more than one application cycle, resulting in artificially elevated claims. Additionally, companies that serve both Canadian and American students benefit from an artificially elevated “success rate,” simply because American medical schools are far less competitive to get into, compared to those in Canada.

To our knowledge, there have been no studies done on whether students who pay for medical school interview preparation actually achieve a higher “success rate,” nor is there a universally accepted definition of what constitutes “success.” Given the high cost associated with medical school interview preparation services, we sought to answer the following questions:

What is the post-interview acceptance rate for all medical school applicants in Canada?
Do students who pay for medical school interview preparation achieve higher rates of post-interview acceptance than those who do not?

Methods

Data Collection & Analysis (all applicants)

To quantify the post-interview acceptance rate for all Canadian medical school applicants, we divided the class size by the number of interview invites using publicly available data for all English-speaking medical schools in Canada (Table 1).

A table that displays the post interview acceptance rate for all English-speaking medical schools in Canada — **Table 1. 2024-2025 Post Interview Acceptance Rates.** In total, ~8403 medical school interview invites were released during the 2024-2025 application cycle. Of those invited for an interview, 2709 were admitted to medical school. The pooled average acceptance rate was 32.2% (2709/8403). The raw average acceptance rate was 32.3%.

Data Collection & Analysis (our students)

Using customer data available from the Canadian Premed website order tracking system, we identified 111 orders for interview preparation services between April 2023 and July 2025 (i.e., Mock MMI Interviews, Mock Panel Interviews, or Mock vMPIs). Of these 111 orders, 38 were duplicates (i.e., the same student purchased multiple interview preparation packages) and 2 were refunded without providing a service to the student, leaving us with available data for 71 of our previous students.

To ensure our post-interview acceptance rate could be reported on a per-application-cycle basis, we manually reviewed each order to ensure that there were no duplicates. In other words, no students had worked with us for more than 1 application cycle and received subsequent acceptance to medical school.

Of the 71 students for whom data were available, we were aware that 33 of them had been accepted to medical school (either because they informed us via e-mail or because they posted about it publicly on social media) and 2 of them had been rejected. We did not know if the remaining 36 students were accepted to medical school at the beginning of the study.

To gather data on the remaining 36 students, we sent out a survey to their e-mail addresses on file and incentivized them to provide us with the outcome of their medical school interview with a $10.00 Amazon gift card. Three e-mail reminders were sent to these students between November 22, 2025 and December 1, 2025.

After the survey had closed, 19 of the 36 students had responded, 9 indicated that they had received an offer to medical school, and 10 indicated that they did not, leaving us with 17 students for whom no data was available.

To complete our dataset, we imputed the interview results for the remaining 17 students by multiplying the per-cycle acceptance rate of our survey respondents by the number of students for whom we had not received a response. Our calculations were as follows: 9/19 x 17 = 8.0526 imputed acceptances and 10/19 x 17 = 8.947 imputed rejections. We then added the imputed acceptances to the confirmed acceptances (42 + 8.0526 = 50.0526) to derive the imputed number of acceptances. Finally, we divided the imputed number of acceptances (50.0526) by the total number of students (71) to arrive at our per-cycle, post-interview invite acceptance rate of 70.5%

Results

Based on the results of this study, students who received a Canadian medical school interview and worked with us to prepare had a per-cycle, post-interview acceptance rate of 70.5%. This number is significantly higher than the national average of 32.2% for all Canadian medical school interview invitees.

Discussion

Our results suggest that our students were 2.19x more likely to receive an acceptance to medical school, post-interview invite, compared to the general pool of medical school invitees in Canada. In absolute terms, our students were 38.3% more likely (70.5% - 32.2% = 38.3%) to get accepted to medical school after working with us for interview preparation. As expected, this number is significantly lower than what many medical school consulting companies advertise (i.e., upwards of 90%).

Companies that advertise “success rates” higher than 90% should be approached with extreme skepticism, as it is unclear how they arrive at such claims. Such companies likely employ dishonest marketing tactics, such as reporting “success rates” over 2 or more years, rather than on a per-application cycle basis. Additionally, given the relative ease of getting into medical school in America, compared to Canada, companies that serve both countries may have an artificially elevated “success rate” due to their American students. It is also possible that such claims are simply made up, having no basis in reality.

Strengths & Limitations:

To our knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to systematically study the post-interview acceptance rate of Canadian medical school applicants. We used publicly verifiable data from official sources to quantify the post-interview acceptance rate for every English-speaking medical school in Canada. This study accounts for waitlist movement between English-speaking medical schools, as it is assumed that students who received multiple post-interview offers decided to fill one of the available 2709 medical school class seats across Canada. Given the limitations of the publicly available data, we do not know how many applicants received interview invitations at more than one medical school. Additionally, we did not include the 3 French-only Canadian medical schools, University of Sherbrooke, University of Montreal and Laval University. However, we do not anticipate that the inclusion of these schools would have materially affected our results, as publicly available data suggest that acceptance rates for these schools are similar to those of English-speaking schools.

Given the study design, our survey-based retrospective cohort had a relatively high rate of non-imputed data (76%). Furthermore, we believe that our handling of missing data represents a fair and transparent statistical analysis. Other potential options we considered to handle the missing data are as follows: 1) omit the survey non-respondents, or 2) use the national pooled per-cycle, post-interview acceptance rate (32.2%) to impute the missing data. Following these aforementioned procedures would have resulted in per-cycle post-interview acceptance rates of 77.7% or 66.9%, respectively. Both of these figures are still 2.08 to 2.41 times higher than the national average of 32.2% in relative terms, or 34.7% to 45.5% higher in absolute terms. Even if we had assumed that all 17 survey non-respondents had not received an offer to medical school, students who worked with Canadian Premed for interview preparation were still 1.84 times more likely to receive an offer of admission, compared to all interviewees (27.0% more likely in absolute terms).

Conclusions:

Based on the results of this study, we conclude that our students had a per-cycle post-interview acceptance rate of 70.5%, which is significantly higher than the national average of 32.2% for all medical school interview invitees. Companies that advertise “success rates” higher than 90% should be approached with a healthy dose of skepticism.

References:

Conflicts of Interest:

The author operates Canadian Premed (www.canadianpremed.ca), a paid interview preparation and application review service for Canadian medical school applicants. Client outcomes reported in this study are used to inform and market our services. No external funding or third-party influences were involved in data collection, analysis, or reporting.

Disclosures:

All data was derived from internal tracking and voluntary client surveys, with methods detailed above for full transparency. All data were anonymized for the statistical analysis of this study. Please note that while this study was designed to be fair, transparent and representative of our client’s outcomes, this study has not yet been submitted to a peer-reviewed scientific journal at the time of writing.

Medical School Acceptance Rates in Canada (Post Interview Invite): A Retrospective Cohort Study