Medical school entry requirements often include a list of extracurricular activities, such as volunteering, clinical hours, or other experiences related to the profession you hope to pursue.
At some point, almost every future student wonders: “do med schools verify activities, or does the admissions committee trust applicants to be truthful?”
The answer is more detailed than you might expect, and it is important to know it before submitting your application.
See details below!
Do Medical Schools Check Your Activities on Application?
Yes, and there are several layers to this.
Medicine is a profession built on public trust, and medical schools have a responsibility to decide who they are willing to put in front of patients. False information on an application is not just a harmless way of making your CV look better. It can be a warning sign about the applicant’s honesty and integrity, both of which are fundamental qualities expected of doctors.
Of course, every year a school receives hundreds of applications for pre-medical programs or studies, and each application contains a substantial list of activities. Verifying every single point is simply impossible, so in practice admissions committees check them selectively, but consistently.
Committees first look for consistency between what you have written and what is supported by references, documents, and the interview.
If you write in your application that you spent hundreds of volunteer hours on a hospital ward, but during the interview you cannot describe a specific situation from that time, it will raise doubts.
How Medical Schools Audit Applications and Contact Your References?
Usually, the simplest method is to contact the person who signed your reference or confirmed your clinical hours. The admissions committee will either phone or email the contact details provided in your documents and ask them to confirm a few things.
What do verifiers do?
- They confirm that the individual genuinely supervised you.
- They verify that the number of hours stated in your application is correct.
Verification can also take other forms. Some universities ask for official confirmation on the organisation’s letterhead, including a stamp and the supervisor’s contact details. Others use systems where the person providing the reference completes a short online form.
In some cases, questions relating to specific experiences may also arise during the interview. An interviewer may ask you to describe an experience mentioned in your CV in considerable detail – the kind of detail that would generally only be possible if you had taken part in it.
For example, if you started a medical club, they could ask you to describe the process in detail, step by step, and explain what you learned from it.
What Do Verifiers Do and Say When Contacted by Admissions Committees?
When the university contacts someone by phone or email, they will usually ask a few simple questions.
Do medical schools contact your activities and what they ask?
- whether the candidate was engaged,
- whether they were punctual,
- whether they showed initiative?
That is why it is best to choose referees who have genuinely worked with you and know you well, rather than someone who is only willing to sign the form because a friend asked them to.
Do Medical Schools Verify Volunteer Hours, Shadowing, and Clinical Work?
Yes, and this is an area in which the verification process can be particularly detailed.
Clinical hours, shadowing, and volunteering are all parts of an application that are relatively easy to exaggerate, so admissions committees tend to scrutinise them very closely.
If the number of hours on your CV does not match what your supervisor confirms, that is one of the most common reasons an application gets sent for further verification.
The university may also ask for the contact details of the organisation where you completed your placement and call them to confirm that the programme actually existed there during the period you specified.
How to Document Your Pre-Med Hours?
Start keeping a record from day one. Don’t leave it until just before you apply and then try to piece everything together from memory.
A simple spreadsheet is all you need:
- record the date,
- where you were,
- how many hours you did,
- and a short note about what you worked on that day.
Once you’ve completed each stage, ask your supervisor to sign the record or send you a quick email confirming that the number of hours is correct. It takes a couple of minutes and could save you a lot of hassle later.
Make sure you also keep any official paperwork, such as letters from organisations, certificates showing that you completed research hours, and emails confirming your place on a work placement.
Keep your supervisors’ contact details too, even once you’ve finished working with them (their phone number, email address and job title).
So, do med schools verify activities? Yes, but the better organised your records are from the start, the less stressful it will be if the admissions committee decides to check that the experience you listed in your application actually happened.
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