<p>Gold
Unfortunately, many universites (eg Auborn) do have Bachelor’s degree in “premedical science”.</p>
<p>It is hard for me to read these posts and believe these kids are serious. If they were to tell an adcom that they picked univ A to get into med school, it would be “good bye”.</p>
<p>Pick a University where you think you will get a good education in a degree that you like. Do the required premed requirements for the med school you would like to get into, but do a degree in something that you would enjoy doing. If you enjoy it, you will do well and your chances of getting into med school will increase.</p>
<p>–These are all very interesting points, but a question I have been pondering is this: If you attend a University/College that is Renowned or highly ranked (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, JHU, MIT etc…), won’t that give a much better chance of getting into Medical School. For example, if it comes down to a 3.5/4 student at Yale versus a 3.9/4 student from some simple college with a 90% acceptance rate, isn’t it more logical that the Yale Student is chosen. I mean, Medial School Admissions officers are typically quite intelligent and would recognize that JHU or MIT offer a much more rigorous course? </p>
<p>–Furthermore, as with high school, aren’t colleges always looking for the student that challenges him or herself and takes the most rigorous courses (like AP classes in high school)? The equivalence of challenging courses are the elite, top-notch, selective universities. </p>
<p>–It appears quite obvious that those students who perform at a high level in selective colleges have a great chance of medical school acceptance. Lastly, bear in mind that students all have class ranks and percentiles. So even if a student has 3.4 at Cornell, they may be ranked in the top 10% which by itself depicts the college’s rigorous standards. This is contrasted to a student again who has 3.7 at a local college and only falls into the top 25% of students. At this point, the grade inflation is obvious and I am fairly confident medical school admissions offices will deeply consider this.</p>
<p>-If anyone has any comments, please post back</p>
<p>–No. Top schools get SOME leeway, but 0.4 is a gigantic gap.</p>
<p>–Yes, but unlike HS, there are lots of good reasons to go to a less selective college, including financial reasons.</p>
<p>–Again, this is true in principle, but you’re dramatically overestimating the difference. 0.3 is huge, and Cornell’s top 10% is probably in the 3.9 range rather than 3.4.</p>
<p>– Agree with BDM here. There is no way it could possibly give you 0.4 advantage.</p>
<p>– In addition to the financial reasons, another reason I can think of is that for some students who are more prone to be discouraged for a little bit setback, it may not be good for them to go to a very top school to compete with so many ambicious students. (Some students have such a good work ethics that they can study from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm almost non-stop, if they do not have classes on that day, and it is not before mid-term.) On the other hand, some students tend to do better when they have better competitors.</p>
<p>– If I remember it correctly, Yale’s top 5% starts from 3.92. So I do not believe a 3.5 student from Yale is competitive – given the fact that only a little bit more than 200 students (out of 1300) from Yale apply to medical schools each year. Suppose that one half of these students are current students, it is only about 100 students who apply without a gap year. Thus, you know you are likely in a good shape (GPA-wise only) if you are among the top 100 students – This is because the admission rate of alumni applicants is always much lower. Granted, I may use a higher standard here, as there are also many competitive pre-laws who maintain an astonishing GPA. But I have the impression that pre-meds tend to have a higher GPA than pre-laws, as it is much more difficult to get into medical schools. (I do not know whether my impression is correct or not though.)</p>
<p>MCAT: We know the national mean for medical students is a 3.55-ish GPA. Approximately (since it’s not the median) half of all medical students across the country did worse than that in undergraduate, most of them at less-rigorous institutions.</p>
<p>So I think a 3.5 from Yale is a very competitive GPA indeed, especially considering it’ll usually be paired with an excellent MCAT score.</p>
<p>What about majors? Would a medical school look more highly upon someone who takes a double major than, say, a student who does a major-minor or just 1 major? What do they think of dual-degrees?</p>
<p>Thanks for the correction (again, as in the past :-)), BDM.</p>
<p>Just a minor point about what you just wrote: “Cornell’s top 10% is probably in the 3.9 range”:</p>
<p>Does this number include the effect of A+ being considered as 4.3 at Cornell? (if I remember correctly, they do have A+ in addition to A.) Or, is it an AMCAS-recalculated GPA, that is, an A+ is considered the same as A?</p>
<p>I only located this information, but do not know how to translate that into the number you posted - if this is even possible:</p>
<p>(For the numbers posted in this link, Is an A+ considered as 4.0 or 4.3?)</p>
<p>Let me try to answer an “easier” question from cchang44 – hope I got it right this time :-)</p>
<p>Double major does not give you much boost (if any at all), from what I learned again and again from many people who posted here. Neither does a minor.</p>
<p>At Duke, which counts an A+ as a 4.0, the top 5% of students are something in the range of 3.92. So I suspect Cornell, if you AMCAS-corrected it, would have a top 10% of perhaps 3.90 or 3.85 or something like that.</p>
<p>Most academic majors (e.g. excluding nursing, kinesiology, communications) have the same rates of admissions to medical school. Double majors or extra minors do not matter. I don’t know what you mean by dual-degrees; these usually refer to JD/MBA programs or MD/PhD or something like that.</p>
<p>Hmm. At my D’s not so elite school with no A+'s , less than 2% of graduates have a 3.95 or above. It appears that maybe 7.5% have a 3.85 or above (based on the number of magna and summa cum laude grads/total grads).</p>
<p>curm, Do you think that quite high percentage of magna and summa cum laude grads from your D’s school are premeds? I remember seeing somewhere that at one of the LAC (Williams College, I think), they have relative few summa, and all the students names and their majors are listed. It appears that relative few of them are from a major (at that school) that typically have a high concentration of premeds. Of course, this does not imply that they are not premeds even though they are not life science or biohemistry or chemistry majors.</p>
<p>Actually MCAT2, that’s about the harshest magna (3.85) and summa (3.95) cut-offs and smallest percentages I’ve seen. And I have no breakdown for pre-meds. I recognized some of the names (it’s a small school ;)) of pre-meds I have heard my D mention, so some made the cut.</p>
<p>I think I now understand your Q. “Are a large %-age of those magna and summa kids pre-meds?” Well, not that many are science majors, I know that. But overall, I’d say “No”. The names I recognized were evenly distributed between law, med, and grad school kids.</p>
<p>If my memory serves me well, I think at my child’s school, magna cutoff was 3.85 and summa cutoff was 3.93 last year. I do not know how many of them are science majors. </p>
<p>On his school’s newspaper, when a newspaper reporter wants to write an article about high achieving students, it is often the case that the premed students would be selected and interviewed. This makes me wonder whether a large %-age of those magna and summa kids are pre-meds.</p>
<p>Some of these high achieving science students stand out not only by their excellent grades (and research), but also by the number of advanced courses they have taken before graduation. I do not know the details, but there seems to be another honor (1% or something) in addition to summa and magna; its criteria depends solely on the number of A’s (excluding A-) that a student has received. So these kids try to take as many courses and accumulate as many A’s as possible. Unlike in high school (many high achieving high schoolers did the same things – taking 13-15 APs, but AP is generally much easier), it is not easy to achieve this goal in college. (Some would argue that it is not worth the efforts to achieve that, as academic excellence is more than just the grades. An example is that shesmarty that you referred to recently seems to have “only 3.89” for her science GPA and she definitely did great in her medical school admission. I also know many 3.85-3.9 non-URM students who got accepted to “good” medical schools in the past.)</p>
<p>Dang. Now, I’m interested. I’ll look at 2008 data, as I can’t find 2009 and see the number of science major (bio, chem, biochem majors/total magna and summa). BTW I did some quick googling and many schools have much higher percentages of magna and summa than my kid’s school. I found a similar LAC at 24%, and 3 top schools - 1 was 20% the other 2 were 15%. I also saw that Duke had GPA cut-offs similar to my D’s school (based on percentages of 5% for summa , 10% for magna). Leads me , on the basis of 10 whole minutes of research, too conclude…it’s tough at a number at schools. ;)</p>
<p>Duke gives summa cum laude status to any student who graduates in the top 5% of the class. (This is actually a slight oversimplification, but let’s roll with it for now.) It gives magna cum laude status to anybody who graduates in the top 15% of the class, unless they have already received summa status.</p>
<p>So only 10% of students (the 85th through 95th percentile) will receive magna cum laude; this does not, however, mean that they are in the top 10%.</p>
<hr>
<p>Appendix: Duke’s complication. To give students a fixed target to aim at, summa and magna are not actually based upon percentile. Instead, the specific cutoffs are obtained from the percentiles from the previous year’s graduating class. In other words, what percentile would you have been if you had graduated LAST year? There is relatively little variation in any single year, so this method is fairly reliable.</p>