<p>I see just the opposite. The admissions “rules” are more flexible for disadvantaged students for all professional-type schools, including law. It’s not that URM’s “need” gpa boosts (your term, not mine), it’s just that they can avail themselves of gpa boosts (summer courses) with no adverse reaction to their applications. There is zero-nada-zilch evidence that the same is true for ORMs.</p>
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<p>I’ve always wondered if the “lot more work” ultimately translates into better/faster processing skills, and thus a point or two on the mcat? Since such college transfers are extremely rare, there is no way to study it…</p>
<p>Sakky- I have seen your posts for years, especially on the Berkeley board, I will admit to the audience that sometimes they are just too long for my apparent short attention span and I skim some of them. Can you give me some context?</p>
<p>Are you a student? Parent? Med student? Professor? Did you apply to med school? Some one you know applied? I know you have posted for many years, but without going back in history to do a search of posts, I sincerely do not recall from what position you are advocating what you say.</p>
<p>sakky has always held these opinions (that one should simply try to game the system as much as possible) which I believe he derives from some false assumptions. He chooses to believe that med school adcoms are who have no idea that MIT is tougher than Podunk University or that engineering requires more work than an English major. The reality is more complicated than that.</p>
<p>For example, it’s true that MIT students are accepted into med school with ~3.6 average GPA, not much different than Duke or Princeton students. But, why should we be surprised? Is MIT really grade deflated? No. In fact, molliebat (a prominent MIT poster), PMed me the link to internal MIT documents showing that, after the freshman year, 40-50% of the grades passed out at MIT are A’s. </p>
<p>With regards to engineers, it’s not that we don’t care that engineering is harder than liberal arts. It’s that engineers often don’t quite have the social skills (on average) or the EC’s as liberal arts majors. Because their “soft” factors aren’t as strong, we make them make it up with GPA and MCAT. So, it APPEARS as if a 3.7 GPA engineering major has the same chances of getting into med school as a 3.7 GPA English major. In reality, a 3.7 GPA Engineering major with average social skills and average EC’s has the same chances of getting into med school as a 3.7 GPA English major with above average social skills and above average EC’s. That’s the most common profile we see from engineers and liberal arts majors. </p>
<p>My point being, give adcoms a little more credit They receive thousands of apps a year for many many years. They know all the tricks in the book. If I see a summer class or two, I won’t care. But, if I see 3 summer classes, 2 P/F classes, a couple of withdraws, and 2 community college courses, I know something’s up.</p>
<p>^^
well said as always NCG and Kristen, building a medical school class is a tricky game with lots of moving parts that many people fail to recognize. Additionally, as I said on another thread, getting into medical school is far from just “being the best,” and even just “being the best” is far from having the best MCAT/GPA.</p>
<p>Additionally, I want to address the notion that Brown “curves to an A-.” I have no idea what prompted such a comment. First off, A- doesn’t even exist at Brown since we don’t have pluses or minuses. More seriously though, yes, Brown gives out a lot of As, but it is not out of touch with other peer schools, and the reason why we give out a lot of As is not because we curve to it but because we avoid curving away from it. I did not take a single class with a capped # of As because at least in every course I took, the professor felt that an A meant “this student has mastered the material of the course” instead of “this student has bested the group of students that took the class at the same time as him.” If I recall, every one of my classes had set scores for C, B, and A.</p>
<p>Let me help you with that: the curve is based on the course average, not the mode. (Hopefully, AP Stats will come back quickly.)</p>
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<p>Perhaps not out of touch, but the gpa leader of the Ivy pack; Yale is next closest. Statistically, Brown and Dartmouth students are interchangeable (number-swise), yet Brown has a mean gpa of 3.6+, whereas Dartmouth is <3.4. Thus, the average Brown student is well-positioned to apply to med school; in contrast, the average Dartmouth student has work to do.</p>
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<p>Exactly. Thanks for supporting my point. :)</p>
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<p>Many colleges do the same, but the difference is the prof makes the test extremely rigorous so the average test/course score comes out to a 70/75 (C+/B-). In essence, its a de facto curve.</p>
<p>^ Do you refer to any college or Brown specifically?
If the former, at least in DS’s year at his college,
You are only allowed to switch from for-grade to pass/fail by a certain deadline. (not allowed to switch in the other direction.)
gen. education classes are not allowed to take pass/fail. (Neither AP credits nor credits from any other colleges can be used to fulfill the gen. education requirement either.) Foreign language classes must be taken no matter what. (mind you, many language classes start from 8:00 am – a good training for getting up early.)
All classes required for your majors can not be taken pass/fail.
Some for-grade classes (e.g., gen. ed. classes) need to be taken before a certain semester.</p>
<p>If a class can be taken pass/fail, you may actually take advantage of this if the professor welcomes many students to take his class pass/fail (but you take it for the grade.) Most professors hate those students who take the class pass/fail though. The reason is that those who take pass/fail are either weaker students (esp. for STEM classes) or the students who spend less time on it. I guess your chances of getting As may be greater. This is the beauty of going to a school where many students take classes pass/fail! (unless the “premed-hater” professor intentionally excludes the pass/fail students in his grading/curve.)</p>
<p>mcat2 - is your DS at Brown? I meant Brown specifically. I don’t know all the rules at Brown but from what I remember, they made it sound like it was possible for most classes.</p>
<p>^ A downside of going to a school where there is a lenient policy of dropping a class very late in the semester. Many students who could not get an A or A- may drop the class late in the game. All of a sudden, some “low A” students get the B grade after those students drop out at the last minute.</p>
<p>You could argue that this could be considered as a plus from another point of view, because you yourself may drop the class as a risk-avoidance strategy.</p>
<p>texaspg, he was not. Last time I heard of it, a Brown student can take every class P/F and still graduate. Of course, a premed student can not do this. But his “premed game plan” could be somewhat different because of this policy.</p>
<p>“Last time I heard of it, a Brown student can take every class P/F and still graduate.”</p>
<p>This is what I thought was possible at Brown. So technically it is possible to have a single GPA needed for med school and have all other classes as P/F?</p>
<p>^^Yup, and that it seems to me is the beauty in Brown’s policy for the masses. By essentially eliminating “bad” grades, students can be more cooperative, i.e., less competitive; and I think it logically follows that they wouldn’t have to work as hard as students at a peer school (Dartmouth) which awards plenty of C’s, and where premed prereqs are generally curved to a B- (mode).</p>
<p>I understand what you’re saying blue bayou, I guess I was under the impression that if a class is “curved” to anything, that implies the professor is fitting the curve to a normal distribution with grades determined based on percentiles. With that definition, I did not take a single class with a curve.</p>
<p>The average course load at brown is 32 courses (4/semester) with labs not counting as their own courses. Many, many people take 5 in a semester at some point but I’m pretty sure it’s still just a significant minority.</p>
<p>In some top publics, the grading curve can be extremely harsh for the premeds taking the sciences. To some extent, I feel it wholly unfair because the professors don’t end up caring for how much you know but rather how good you become in overcoming the awful obstacles they set in trying to cap certain students within a specific letter grade. I have yet to find out why they do that because apparently, curving a student down in a lab course or a normal lecture course seems pathetic… I don’t know why this information is not sent to med schools and if it does they should account for it. For example, I had an A in a specific course. Because 5 other peers within a group of 20 got that raw grade as well…the professors decides to give the lower A people B’s. How does that even make sense??? It’s just that it makes one pretty frustrated after they did all that hard work in the course…only to find out that the prof will be unjust and grade you not based on your knowledge but on how smart the other students were. Might as well let these people tell you early on whether you’ll get into med school or rather end up somewhere else because they felt you were weaker than the other kids lol.
I sort of feel bad for the kids that got B’s and I sympathized with them because they actually knew their stuff. This is something someone needs to consider when choosing schools. For example, I know another state uni that is not as well known but is top 100. It does not shy from giving 100% As to people who deserve it…in fact even the most incompetent people can get As…yet they have the same percentage of premed succeed in application as my uni.
It’s sort of funny how both unis are extreme…yet not one uni I know strikes a balance between this unfairness.</p>
<p>That is a distinction without a difference. For example, one of the more/(most?) competitive colleges – Cal-Berkeley – technically does not curve Frosh Chem. In theory, everyone could score a 90+ and earn an A. But there is absolutely no way any Chem prof would allow that to happen; it is not in their DNA. The Frosh Chem tests are designed so that the average score is in the low 70’s, with plenty of 60’s and 50’s. And, if a class happens to be particularly smart, and aces the first test (with an average in the 80’s), the next test will be brutal, and many will not be able to finish in the time allotted. So, by the end of the semester, a nice bell curve of scores is achieved. Yet the syllabus clearly says 90 = A, 80 = B, 70 = C, and the like. It just so happens that only ~40% of the class earn an 80+ by the end of the semester. And it just so happens each and every semester, each and every year.</p>
<p>^ What you just described seems to be what happens. Sometimes a professor may overdo it or underdo it.</p>
<p>DS once said the class average of a freshman year biology test two years after his (this is supposedly an AP level bio, or a little bit beyond get) was 47 out of 100. A majority of students in that class had AP bio 5 in high school.</p>
<p>A low 70’s seems to the “right” class average. A professor would be “happy” about his design of the test if the class average is about that. Some premed students use the rule of thumb that if his grade is about 10-12 points above the average, they may hit B+ or even A-. But many would say the number should be 15-17 points above the class average in order to be safely in the range of some forms of As.</p>
<p>An example of “underdoing it” (in the first part of the class): There were 25-30 percents of students who took an introductory level statistics got 100s in their first midterm, because the professor (intentionally?) overlooked the fact that essentially all students had learned the topics in their AP stats class in high school. The professor scrambled to fix “the problem”. It was not that difficult for him to do that at all. He just pull in many topics from an intermediate/advanced statistics class – luckily only the applied ones, not the theoretical ones that would require much more solid foundation in advanced math well beyond the (applied) calculus 3. (DS located the covered topics from an intermediate level statistics textbook, which was like over 1000 pages; most “essential” topics in it were covered in 4 weeks.) I heard that there was a slide at the begining of these advanced topics which warned the students that there would be “sweats and blood” starting from this point, in this “introductory” course.</p>
<p>Unlike in high school, the days of getting high 90’s are gone when you are a premed (or a STEM major) at most colleges. It is up to professor to decide how difficult or how easy the test would be, even in an introductory class.</p>
<p>mcat2 and bluebayou are completely right. It will come as a shock to many and you must prepare for it. One think I have come to know is that professors don’t care for what your background may be. Disadvantaged? Too bad. Poor? Too bad. Struggling with family life? Too sad.
It really comes down on the individual to be smart and use the free resources the uni has the offer. Also use group people to converse about what you know. I find that peer discussion about lecture material is only advised ONCE you have actually read the material. Don’t just read it with them…cause you’ll end up chatting with your peers about how worried you are about your grade.
I have mixed feelings for bell curves, and quite frankly I don’t get them at all.</p>
They receive thousands of apps a year for many many years. They know all the tricks in the book. If I see a summer class or two, I won’t care. But, if I see 3 summer classes, 2 P/F classes, a couple of withdraws, and 2 community college courses, I know something’s up.</p>