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Yes, but medical schools do evaluate coursework within the limits of what they can know, and it's better to take a hard course and do well than to take an easy course and do well. So avoiding challenges throughout will NOT be a good idea. You just have to make quite sure that you can manage it acceptably.
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<p>Within the limits of what they know, eh? Well, evidently, they don't know much. And part of it seems to be that they just don't WANT to know much. See below for more.</p>
<p>And besides, your notion of being able to 'handle challenges', again, assumes certain behaviors implicitly. I can think of certain graduate-level courses in which * nobody * got an A, not the graduate students, not the few undergrads who took it, not anybody. Graduate students generally tend not to care very much about their grades anyway, because their real goal is to learn something that they can use in their research (after all, nobody is going to be placed in an tenure-track assistant professor position because of good grades - that decision is based on the quality of your research) . And the few undergrads who were in the class also just wanted to learn, as they were on the road to becoming graduate students themselves. Hence, even if you could 'manage' this particular course successfully, you would still probably end up with at best a B. </p>
<p>I remember reading about the famous economist/sociol scientist Thomas Sowell talking about his time as a PhD economics student at Chicago and how he stated that it was quite common for Chicago PhD students to fail many graduate-level economics courses. At the time, you didn't need to pass any actual courses in order to actually get your Econ PhD from Chicago at the time (although I'm sure that's changed now). All you needed to do was write an acceptable dissertation. Courses existed basically as a way for you to be challenged by the profs, and since this was Chicago, these profs were arguably the best econ profs in the world. If even the PhD students were failing those courses left and right, I'm sure that undergrads would have been failing them too, had they been taking them. </p>
<p>But med-schools don't care about that. They'll just see a bunch of failing grades and conclude that this candidate is no good. It wouldn't matter if everybody, including the graduate students, also failed the same course. </p>
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Of course, there are always ways to pretend like you're taking a challenging courseload without actually doing so -- one popular choice is to take lots and lots of easy classes. Another is to take independent studies. Medical schools never quite seem to catch on that these are actually much easier than normal classes, or at least they were at my school. (I never took any.)
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<p>The other trick I've found is to just do 'research' for credit. Not ony are you then building up your research credentials, but research credit generally translates into a string of easy A's, as long as you do the work. </p>
<p>Again, med-schools could find all this out. I'm convinced they just don't want to know. </p>
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Part of it, though, is that MIT is an exceptional example in a few ways. For one thing, MIT is the second most grade-deflated school in the country, behind only the Naval Academy. So any broader analysis using MIT is, to invent a word, "in-trapolating" in a way that may not be fair.
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<p>I'm intentionally utilizing a corner case to illustrate my point. You may recall in math that one way to disprove a theorem is to find one example (usually a corner case) that violates the theorem. </p>
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Part of it, though, is that MIT is an exceptional example in a few ways. For one thing, MIT is the second most grade-deflated school in the country, behind only the Naval Academy. So any broader analysis using MIT is, to invent a word, "in-trapolating" in a way that may not be fair.</p>
<p>More importantly, however, MIT students are actually penalized, GPA-wise, for having attended MIT. A 3.4 from Duke, Stanford, or Penn is a quite competitive GPA for mid-tier medical schools. (i.e. not USN's 3-10, but 15-20 are quite safe and 1-2 are very difficult to predict regardless).</p>
<p>After all, the mean GPA from these schools among their admitted students is roughly a 3.5 anyway. (Penn, I've heard secondhand, might be in the 3.35 range!)</p>
<p>But MIT kids have a mean GPA for admitted students of 3.7, so 3.4 starts to look low by comparison.</p>
<p>In other words, grade deflation is not the only or even the largest factor that makes MIT a tough place to be a premed.</p>
<p>For what it's worth, I'm currently enrolled in a medical school where my BCPM GPA at time of application was ~.4 GPA points below the median despite ORM status. There are situations in which low GPAs can and are "forgiven".</p>
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<p>3.) Preempt: extracurriculars are not completely defined by grade availability. Deflated schools should, theoretically, prompt their students to work harder on their schoolwork at the expense of their EC's, but good advising would recognize this as the more important flaw and make sure students had a firm understanding of what kind of EC's were necessary and available.</p>
<p>In other words, I argue that the overcompensation we see from adcoms (MIT students have admitted-student GPAs and MCAT scores higher than the national average) cannot be explained by EC's alone. After all, after MIT kids equal, say, the Duke kids in terms of GPA, they should stop focusing on GPAs and start pushing for EC's.</p>
<p>In other words, while it might be TRUE that grade deflation causes EC's to diminish, good advising and campus culture would have counteracted that effect earlier than we actually see with MIT kids.
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<p>Well, frankly, part of it is something that we haven't talked much about, but which is that MIT students disproportionately don't really "need" medical school. The majority of MIT students are engineers, and hence, have very nice and decently paying jobs as engineers awaiting them. Hence, they may not feel the need to apply to a bunch of no-name, low-ranked med-schools as much as somebody coming out of, say, Duke, with an art history degree. Let's face it. If you can't get into graduate school, what are you going to do with an art history degree? Hence, it wouldn't surprise me in the least that MIT students apply to, on average, higher-ranking med-schools, and obviously these med-schools require higher grades. </p>
<p>But secondly, I think you hit upon another part of the problem - it's the culture. The truth is, the MIT campus culture encourages introversion. It encourages quirkiness and tech-geekiness that I doubt translates well to med-school interviews, or doing a bunch of EC's that require "regular" social skills. </p>
<p>And that gets back to what I've been saying before. Just choosing a school for fit may not help you get into medical school. In fact, it may actually be BAD for you. For example, if you're quiet and antisocial, MIT may fit you very well. But that's precisely what will hurt you if you later apply to med-school. What you would REALLY want is to go to a school that forces you to be social and extroverted, even if that doesn't really fit you, because that kind of school will help you go to med-school.</p>
<p>But back to the case of molliebatmit. She is highly unlike most other MIT students. She has extracurriculars as far as the eye can see. Her problem isn't the extracurriculars. Her problem is her grades.</p>