The Justice Department says GW's School of Medicine and Health Sciences used essay responses to identify applicants' race, then admitted Black applicants with significantly lower MCAT scores than white and Asian applicants it rejected.
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division announced on August 27 that George Washington University's School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS) intentionally discriminated on the basis of race when admitting its 2024 and 2025 entering classes, violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Coverage of the findings reports that admissions officials used applicants' essay responses to surface racial and ethnic background, then factored that into who received an interview — with Black applicants getting interviews, and higher interview scores, at rates DOJ says can't be explained by academic credentials alone.
DOJ said Black students admitted in 2024 and 2025 had significantly lower MCAT scores than white or Asian applicants who were part of the same entering classes. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said GW Med's practices "reveal an intent to prioritize racial diversity over merit, which is unlawful and poses legitimate public health consequences for the patients its future doctors will serve."
As with its earlier findings against Yale's and UCLA's medical schools, DOJ said it will pursue a settlement to bring GW's admissions process into compliance and will sue if talks fail. George Washington University said it disagrees with DOJ's conclusions and believes its admissions process complies with the law. GW Med is now the fourth medical school DOJ has publicly found in violation, after UCLA, Yale, and a wave of quieter probes into 15 more schools opened in June.
Same pattern as Yale Medicine and UCLA Med, just at a new school: an MCAT gap between admitted and rejected applicants, plus a paper trail showing essays were used to infer race. Federal investigators clearly have a template now, and they're moving through it school by school.
For premed applicants, the message isn't political — it's practical. The MCAT and GPA are the numbers a federal investigator can actually pull and compare. That makes them the floor you need to clear, not a box you can outrun with a strong essay.
A personal statement about your background is still valuable and still allowed. What's under a microscope right now is vague "diversity" language that functions as a proxy for race rather than a description of what you actually did.
Ground every claim in something concrete and verifiable — a clinic you volunteered at, a research project, a patient population you worked with. That's true regardless of your background, and it's the kind of essay that reads well under any admissions climate.
Fifteen more medical schools are already under investigation, and DOJ has now applied this same approach to a law school too. If you're building a med school list, assume every program's admissions office is under more scrutiny than it was two years ago — and that MCAT and GPA thresholds will matter at least as much as they did before, if not more.
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