Leo Trasande '94, an HMS student and Adams House tutor, said the profusion of factors in admissions makes it hard to pinpoint what makes Harvard students excel.
"Individual medical school classes appear different even though they are picked on similar criteria," he said.
In the past year, the number of applications to medical schools across the country has declined.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) said in February that the national applicant pool went down by 6.7 percent.
While YMS received a recordbreaking 3,628 applications last year, this year's total dropped to 3,506.
HMS experienced a similar decline from 3,956 applications in 1996 to 3,708 in 1997, said Boodram.
Judy Colwell, assistant director of admissions at Stanford Medical School, said that the number of applications went down there as well