Every year students spend months on the personal statement. But for most medical schools there is little or no point. Most schools do not use personal statements to decide who gets an interview, and some don’t even read them.

This doesn’t mean personal statements don’t matter at all - three schools score the for shortlisting. It just means it’s worth checking your chosen schools’ requirements before spending a lot of time on them.

Use this free tool to check yourself against the entry criteria of all 41 UK Medical Schools. Find out which are worth your UCAS choices.

Every year I watch capable students throw away one or two of their four medicine choices on schools that were never going to interview them. Not because their grades were weak, but because nobody had told them that Imperial ignores GCSEs entirely, or that Birmingham weights them at almost half the decision, or that a UCAT score which comfortably clears one school's bar falls below another's published floor.