Eu vs Non-Eu: who has a better chance in the IMAT ranks

With the new rule this year that EU candidates can choose all 6 Universities while the non-EU will only have their 1st choice taken into consideration a question arises: Who has a better chance of getting in? European or non-European candidates?

There were several developments, among them the increase of places (pdf) to the English programs as well as an update stating that the EU candidates will get an equal chance to get to any of the 6 ranked Universities based solely on their IMAT performance, while the non-Europeans will only get a chance with their first ranked Uni and their other choices will not be considered.

So if you are non-EU and are pissed by this “disadvantage” lets  first see the whole picture by considering how many places there will be in total for Europeans in all the English Medicine courses around Italy:

Bari  21 ; Milano 32; Napoli 8 ;Pavia 70 ; RomeLS 35 ; RomeTV 20 EU spots Total EU spots in all Universities:  186 spots

Total number of candidates for the 2014 IMAT was published a few hours ago: 4954 candidates which is 1000 less than last year will compete around the globe in 2014 IMAT. Those include both EU and non-EU.

How many non-EU candidates there are going to be out of those 4954 is a more difficult question to answer because no official data  was released except the reported above. Therefore I am going to  estimate the total number of Non-EU candidates this year  300 candidates based on the fact that last year there were 250 non-EU candidates overall and there should be some increase due to the spread of news worldwide.

Result

Based on that, there will be 25  European candidates for every available spot in all Universities. The spots for non-EU vary a lot based on University. Lets consider just for a moment that all the 300 of non-EU candidates will compete on the same University, which is very unlikely worst case scenario.  If we take Pavia with its 30 places for non-EU, you will get that there are 10 candidates for every non-EU spot.

So even by the worst case estimate the competition between non-EU is at least 2-3 times easier than the one between EU candidates.

Now you can claim that it’s all based on the 300 non-EU candidate estimate I’ve made, but for me to be wrong with my statement above  there need to be around 700 non-EU candidates and even then they all will have to subscribe to one Uni like Pavia, which I consider to be very unlikely.

Hope this helped you to settle some doubts, wish you the best of luck, the European as well as the non-EU folks! Alex.