Method
How we read residency program pages
Every answer on this site is a sentence a program published about itself, with the link it came from and the date we read it. Anything that cannot carry all three is refused before it reaches a screen. This page is the whole method, including what we throw away.
A requirement needs three things
A fact reaches this site only if it has the program's own sentence, a link to the page that sentence appeared on, and the date somebody read it. That is not a guideline we try to remember. It is a check in the build: a candidate missing any of the three is dropped, and the build prints what it dropped and why.
The effect is that there is nothing on this site we cannot show you the source for. If an answer looks wrong, the sentence it came from is one click away, and you can go and read the program's page yourself.
What we refuse, and why
1065 candidate facts have been thrown out. The reasons, in the build's own words:
| Unclear: the sentence could be read two ways | 345 |
| A preference, not a rule | 258 |
| Mixed: part rule, part something else | 181 |
| A note, not a requirement | 178 |
| A "not required" sentence whose value asserted something anyway | 79 |
| The program is not in our index, so nothing could link to the fact | 7 |
| No source URL, so it cannot be cited | 5 |
| Not a Step 2 CK score (outside 190 to 300) | 4 |
| Quarantined by hand: a chatbot summary, the wrong page, a misread sentence | 8 |
What a program says is not required
A program writing "there is no minimum Step 2 score" has told you something real, and it is the answer to a question people otherwise guess at. We keep those, to the same standard as any other fact, and we mark them so that they can never rule anybody out. They can only ever remove a barrier, never raise one. There are 379 of them, most from programs stating that prior graduate medical education is not required.
The 30 refusals in the table above are the trap in this category. Our reader flags a sentence when it contains a phrase like "not required", and that phrase is often about something else in the same paragraph. "Three Letters of Recommendation (Chair letter preferred, but not required)" arrived tagged as three letters being not required, when three letters are exactly what that program demands. So a "not required" fact is only kept when its own value says absence too. Anything carrying a number or an affirmative is thrown out rather than risk telling you the opposite of what the program wrote.
A preference is not a rule
This is the distinction the whole site rests on, and it is where most published advice about residency applications goes wrong. A program writing "applicants must have graduated within the past five years" has told you something that ends your application before a human reads it. A program writing "applicants with a year of US clinical experience have been the most successful in our program" has told you something true and much softer, which rules nobody out.
124 sentences that read like rules turned out to be the second kind. We record them as what they are, which means we do not record them at all. Knowing which is which is the entire job.
Silence is not evidence
There is a difference between a program that published nothing about visa sponsorship and a program we have not read yet. The first is a fact about them. The second is a gap in our work. Collapsing the two would let us claim we had read pages we never opened, and it would quietly turn our own incompleteness into a statement about somebody's program.
So they are two different answers, they are labelled differently everywhere they appear, and the count of what we have not reached is published on the front page rather than hidden. Today that is 51 programs of 702.
When a program contradicts itself
It happens: an eligibility page and an FAQ on the same site say different things, usually because one of them was updated and the other was not. There are 79 fields where a program's own pages disagree.
We do not choose the more likely one and we do not silently pick the stricter one. Both readings are shown, both with their own link and date, and the answer is marked as needing a look. You are better served knowing the program is ambiguous than being handed a confident answer we invented.
Where the facts come from
Two sources, and we never blur them. 1,092 of the values we hold come from the program's own website. The rest come from the public ACGME program listing, and when a fact is read there, it is cited there, never to the program's homepage. Citing a directory row to a hospital's front page would ship a link where the quoted sentence does not exist, which is a lie in the shape of a citation.
Quotes are kept exactly as published, including their punctuation and line breaks. Where a program's own formatting is ugly, the layout bends rather than the quote.
What we hold, by field
What we hold is 1,977 stated facts carrying 2,085 quoted values: the difference is the fields where a program contradicts itself and both readings are kept. They are not spread evenly, because programs do not publish evenly. Letters of recommendation are the most commonly stated requirement in Internal Medicine; a Step 2 CK minimum is among the rarest, which is worth knowing if you have been told otherwise.
- 532 letters of recommendation, a stated minimum
- 431 visa sponsorship
- 337 prior graduate medical education, almost all of them stating it is not required
- 186 ECFMG certification, by a stated date
- 145 years since graduation, a stated limit
- 66 US clinical experience
- 60 attempts, a stated maximum
- 43 Step 2 CK
- 38 other stated requirements
- 130 program signal statements (required / recommended / considered / mentioned / not required)
- 9 geographic preference statements (considered / required ties / mentioned / not considered)
What this method will not do
- No chance score. We will not put a percentage next to your name. We hold no outcome data yet, so any number of that kind would be invented.
- No ranking. Programs are not sorted against each other.
- No advice to apply to fewer programs. If a program comes off your list because it cannot consider you, that is money freed for one that can.
- No unsourced answer. If we cannot quote it, we do not publish it.
Programs change their pages
They do it without warning and without a changelog, which is why every fact here carries the date it was read rather than being presented as timeless. A date is a claim you can check. If you find a page that now says something different from what we quote, tell us and we will re-read it and correct the record: joseph@thematchlens.com.
Figures on this page are from the data build of 5 September 2026. Page last updated 5 September 2026.