Medical school may be tough to get into, but pre-med students are facing a greater challenge applying now than before.

The new 2002 web-based application developed through the American Medical College Application Service, was designed for a smoother process, but it has actually created problems.

AMCAS plays a major role in the application process because it receives the students’ applications first, verifies them and sends them to individual universities upon each student’s request. AMCAS’ new online system has frustrated Ohio State students and staff because of its many problems.

Mike Buscher, senior in biology and psychology, is the vice president of Alpha Epsilon Delta, a pre-medical student organization at OSU. He had to submit his application twice because he never received a response e-mail from AMCAS.

Other complaints of the AMCAS’ web-based system included a slow server, loss of students’ data, malfunction during submission and server overload – which left applicants unable to fill out the application.

These complications arose because AMCAS launched a project which was not fully developed and had not been successfully tested for all of the schools, said Mark Notestine, assistant dean, Admissions and Records for the OSU Medical School.

The idea of the web-based AMCAS was to take advantage of current technology for a quicker, more efficient and cheaper method, Notestine said.

On the positive side, OSU has taken a role in improving the application process for students.

“We want to be flexible for the students,” Notestine said.

For example, because of the problems applicants faced with AMCAS’ application OSU extended their application deadline one month, Notestine said. OSU monitors the improvements of AMCAS through teleconferences with the Association of American Medical Colleges.

OSU also created a secondary application for pre-med students. Once OSU receives the verified applications from AMCAS, they e-mail students a secondary application. This online application asks for more specifics from the applicant as to why they want to attend OSU.

“OSU has taken a real leadership role nationally in establishing the secondary application,” Notestine said. He said by utilizing this application, the university and students can communicate quickly, and the medical school can begin to recover data which may have been lost because of AMCAS’ troubles.

In previous years, students used paper applications or a disk-based system to apply to medical schools, Notestine said. They could download the application and save it to a floppy disk. Upon completion, students could submit their applications to AMCAS through the mail.

AMCAS could benefit students by giving them the ability to use their own personal computers without having to deal with mailings.

“AMCAS is a good idea because it is easier than writing it all out with a pen and paper and mailing it in, but it needs to be fixed,” Buscher said.