No, PD's love board scores because it's an across-the-board measurement.
Basically, they expect you to have honored or lettered in surgery rotation, then to have some further clinical honors. If you end up with just PASS for all your clinical rotations, that will definitely raise some red flags, but you don't need to sweep them all. Just a few honors mixed in will do the trick. I've been told that a poor grade in psychiatry is a badge of honor for surg applicants. (JK - sort of...) I don't think anyone cares too much about your first two years, as long as you did okay.
I'm curious about the accuracy of these reports about all these unmatched categorical spots. The reason I say this is because someone is always saying that my program (among others) had unfilled spots, which we never have had in the history of the program. Lots of students get confused re: prelim v categorical, and what that means. We are approved for 6 prelims, but we never take more than 2 (although we are flooded with applicants for these spots), so that shows up on Scutwork or wherever as 4 unmatched prelim spots. This is not, in any way, shape or form, the same thing as not filling categorical positions. I'm just curious, what was the list of unmatched spots?
We interview about 30 people for 3 spots and turn down for interviews about twice that many applicants. We don't usually look at folks with board scores < 220, and usually end up with folks in the 240 range. At the time that I was interviewing, these stats placed me in about the middle of the pack, at least in the midwest and western US. I've heard that east coast programs might be less competitive.
