<p>Small nit, but I would recommend Brown over Dartmouth if the sole purpose was gpa-enhancement. I would recommend Yale over Dartmouth for the same purpose. Dartmouth has a bunch of wonderful qualities, but most liberal grading policies in the Ivies is not one of them.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sakky: I don’t disagree. But my issue with your pov is that you have presented zero factual data to support that it does not happen. (IMO, Caltech and MIT are outliers, for all kinds of reasons.)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Perhaps, but the reasons for a lot of rejections are rather obvious. In some cases, its just really bad med school selection. One UCDavis grad with decent number was rejected everywhere, for example, because she only applied to top ~20 med schools…yet, she did not have top 20 numbers; either really bad advising (common at UC) or prestige-whoring, or both. But definitely not mysterious.</p>
<p>The other issue is that med school classes are really small: 100-150 people. Many/most? are public, and take instaters as a priority.</p>
<p>Look at UCSF, for example. Approx. 150 students matriculate. Top ~5 med school, with top 5 numbers. Approx. one-third of the class matriculates from Cal and Stanford undergrads (50). UCSF takes ~15% from OOS (22). Add in the URMs (25%; 38), and students with significant disadvantaged backgrounds - which UC just loves, and there ain’t much room left for ORMs from other instate top schools, including Caltech and USC and Pomona, much less the California residents who attend OOS top schools, including the Ivies, MIT, Northwestern, Duke et al. (150-50-22-38 = 40)</p>
<p>In the final analysis, the numbers admitted are really small, and even in the aggregate, it becomes a group of 40 anecdotes. And that should be no mystery.</p>
I am curious as to where you are getting the evidence of Yale’s supposed GPA enhancement. I have not seen any type of statistics from the last 5 years or so to corroborate this statement and my son’s experience is quite the opposite. Perhaps even if there is some type of inflation it’s in the SS or Humanities areas as the “pre-med” courses seem to be anything but enhanced. I would welcome any links to such evidence.</p>
<p>gradeinflation.com has Yale at 3.51 mean gpa for graduating seniors in '08. That was sourced from the college’s own school newspaper. In contrast, Brown is 3.6+. (Dartmouth is ~3.4, which is why I would suggest B over D for gpa.)</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean it the Ivy road is ‘easy’ for a premed (the competition is LOT higher than Podunk U), but IFF one is gonna attend a tippy top school, then might as attend the college with the most liberal grading policy (Brown, then Yale, which I believe is #2 of the Ivies), if gpa is the primary focus.</p>
<p>And yes, hume/lit courses tend to offer more A’s than the STEM fields, but that is true at (nearly) every college.</p>
But that data is almost 4 years old. Is that your only source of information? Why is there not data from 2008 on and 2005 for other top schools (i.e. Stanford, Harvard)? Also, considering Yale has the lowest acceptance rate next to Stanford (3.55 in 2005) and Harvard (3.45 in 2005) I would expect the average GPA to be higher there than other schools. To quote my son, “everyone here is so freaking smart”.</p>
<p>Not surprised. H wouldn’t want to get beat out by Yale (or Stanford) on anything. hahahahaaha</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yup, but grading policies take years to change.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No doubt about it. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>On this we’ll have to agree to disagree. (The logic escapes me, as it does to the Pres. of Princeton who cracking down on grade inflation. What about Brown?)</p>
<p>I hope CCers notice the sarcastic tone in my post #102.</p>
<p>We all know that the premed pool at most schools are quite different from the pool of all students. I suspect that there are relatively few sub-3.5 students (percentage wise) in the premed pools than the pool of all students in a school.</p>
<p>To oversimplify the case a little bit, let’s assume that only the top 15 percents of students from a school would dare to participate in the premed game at their schools, past orgo 1. AN interesting question is that, as one student among the top 15 % studsents, how would she or he fare in the head-to-head competition?</p>
<p>Regarding the average GPA of a school, it includes a lot of other factors like how many students who are admitted because of the following reasons: 1) development 2) diversity 3) coming from families which are so “upper class” that they will unlikely to be willing to spend 11 years post high school to earn a ticket to this career. For the 3rd cases, most of them would likely care less about GPA. All they need a degree from a college their family can be proud of. (An extreme example: should the famous actress in Harry Potter go to one of these schools, do you think she would labor on GPA like most premeds do, even if she is interesting in taking the real science classes? SHe has other priorities for her life.)</p>
<p>Overall speaking, to be a top student among the top 15% (at some mid-tier school, maybe even top 6% percents!) at ANY school is not easy.</p>
<p>An anecdotal experience of DS’s 4 years at his college: He found that, sometimes for a seemingly easier science classes, you may run into a risk of not getting an A. This is because many students are such an expert in taking any test, e.g., in the premed pool, there are so many 2400 (or very close to 2400) SATers, especially its critical reading section. (Isn’t the 75 percentiles of all students at such a school 800 on SAT Critical Reading?!)</p>
<p>texaspg, I do not know it, although I myself would like to know it as well.</p>
<p>The only clue I ahve: for those students who are PBKs (roughly top 5-6% of the class), there are many students (close to half or at least 1/3?) who are premeds. The GPAs of these students may be around 3.94 (my guess.) 3 percents of these PBKs are about 39 students. So, out of about 200 premed applicants each year, about 20 percents would have that kind of grades. So in order to be the top 20 percents of premed students (purely based on GPAs only), you may need to have that kind of grades. I once heard that about 1 (at most 2) students per residential college would get into a school like H or J each year (excluding all other top med schools.) So 12-15 got into H or J each year (likely excluding URM cases.)</p>
<p>I know one student with 3.95 with about a “lower” 36 MCAT) got into Penn (did not attend), and another with similar GPA got into Columbia (with ~38 MCAT. Did attend) They do not have a “walk on the water” ECs.</p>
<p>The posts above are my pure speculation. It could be off the mark by a lot.</p>
<p>I did not know the class of 2010 is that “strong”, LOL. So my wild estimate may be off, by a lot.</p>
<p>If there were also that many from Yale who got into Yale Med, I would be even more impressed. (The class size is 100 only every year.) Curm may know.</p>
<p>This is exactly what you find during interviews - Ivy League Med Schools like their own as a whole, and premeds may feel the same way about these schools: Yale premeds matriculated in greater numbers in 4 ivy schools:</p>
<p>Yale 21
Penn 19
Harvard 15
Columbia 13</p>
<p>Other top schools came lower: Cornell 8, UCSF 8, Stanford 8, Wash U 6 and Michigan 4</p>
<p>You will find the same for all the ivy undergrads.</p>
<p>Thanks to texaspg and MyOpinions, for posting these numbers. I did not know such data exists. I read with a keen interest where DS’s premed friends might have gone. (e.g., how “lonely” some of them would likely be when they went to a certain school.)</p>
<p>The “map” posted by texaspg reminds me of the “globe” map that the school posted during the college admission cycle. The information posted was about how many students were admitted from each city (or just which state?) in US or abroad. This brings back the sweet memory years ago.</p>
<p>Regarding: “Y Med likes Y UGs”:
I heard Y Med likes H UGs too, like between 10 to 15 (lower teens though) out of a class of 100 students each year, even more than Y UGs.</p>
<p>And I still don’t understand why you continue to object, for like you said, you agree with my basic point, and indeed have argued that students should prefer schools such as Brown, Yale. But you yourself have not presented any evidence to that effect. </p>
<p>It would seem to me that whatever arguments convinced you that Brown is a desirable premed school (because of high GPA and flexible course requirements) would be the same type of arguments that ought to convince you that MIT/Caltech are not. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I have no reason to believe that such ‘non-mysterious’ rejections aren’t simply randomly distributed. For example, I’m sure that there are plenty of obsessively paranoid premeds with 3.9+/40+'s and stellar EC’s, but who will nonetheless apply to a bevy of low-ranked ‘safety’ med-schools (if we could imagine such a concept of a ‘safety’ med-school), simply to ensure that he’s admitted to at least one med-school. So sure, for the purposes of the calculation of admissions statistics, he is likely to be admitted to at least one (safety) medical school…but not necessarily to a med-school that corresponds to his qualifications. </p>
<p>The upshot is that, after canceling out the statistical noise, we’re still left with a significant chunk of highly qualified students who are nevertheless rejected for entirely mysterious reasons. {And yes, the converse is also true - some students who probably should have been rejected do still somehow manage to get admitted.} Hence, even after canceling out the understandable, ‘non-mysterious’ factors, we are still left with a wide range of uncertainty over exactly who will be admitted and who won’t. </p>
<p>To return to kristin’s example, of the applicants with 3.8/30 scores, about 20% will be rejected by every med-school they apply to. Now, I’m willing to agree that perhaps half of those rejectees (hence 10 percentage points) might be attributed to ‘non-mysterious’ factors such as overconfidently applying only to top-ranked med-schools or somehow had terrible interviews or EC’s. But I doubt that the share is much more than half, for after all, the group of students with 3.8.30 tends to be a responsible, studious sub-population. We are therefore left with a whopping 10% of responsible, studious premeds who are nevertheless rejected for entirely mysterious reasons from every med-school that they apply to.</p>
<p>Like I said, that 10% represents a whopping risk. If you told me that even if I practiced responsible driving (e.g. no drinking, not tired, being fully aware of my surroundings, driving a well-maintained car, following all traffic laws), I would nevertheless still suffer an accident 1 out of every 10 times that I drove, I would quit driving today. If I sprained my ankle 1 out of every 10 times that I went jogging - even after properly warming up, stretching, wearing proper shoes, and following proper form - I would quit jogging today. The risk would simply be unacceptably high. But apparently even top premeds have to suffer through a high-risk process. </p>
<p>Med-schools on the other hand, clearly don’t care. Indeed, they surely love the process, because they bear none of the risk and cost. None. All of the risk is born by the premeds themselves. If a premed invests his time to study hard, gets top grades and MCAT’s, diligently engages in EC’s, writes solid essays…and is still nevertheless rejected despite all that investment, well, that’s not the med-school’s problem, is it? They’re not paying, so they don’t care.</p>
<p>As a parent of a current premed student, I certainly had my concern about the admission process. It is especially so when I saw the acceptance rate of 86% for students with 3.9 GPA and a MCAT of 34 (Table 24 per the following link). Please let me know if I read the table incorrectly. I would really like to know what did the 14% of premeds do wrong to deserve such fate. </p>