Customer Reviews

The Penguin Guide To American Medical and Dental Schools (Penguin Original)

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I am a 26 year old master's student applying to various dental schools. I bought the Penguin's Guide to help me in my search for the appropriate schools to apply to, but found a lot of the information to be incorrect. For example, almost every school listed in this book says that preference is given to state residents - Even the schools that do NOT give any preference (Temple University, for example). After finding over 4 mistakes I decided that if I wanted the absolute correct information, I needed to call the school myself.

I also did not like the organization of the book. It listed schools alphabetically, rather than by state. This made it difficult for those applicants looking for schools within a specific state. For example, the Medical University of South Carolina was listed under "M".

In addition, the medical schools were not separated from the dental schools. For a pre-dental student, this means having to sort through endless pages of the hundreds of medical schools listed to find the relatively few amount of dental schools. When you do finally find the dental school you are looking for, the overall GPA and science GPA are calculated using the median, which is sometimes inaccurate. If you call the dental schools, they will tell you only the averages.

This is not to say that others will not find this book useful. If you are interested in the yearly grant money received by each school, the Gorman rating, the school's history and location, or the NIH ranking then this book would be very useful. Personally, I was disappointed and ended up purchasing a different reference book. Buyer beware - This is just one of the risks of buying something over the internet.