<p>If I choose to graduate with a BA instead of BS in Biology, will I likely run into a risk of being labeled as a "slacker"?</p>
<p>As far as I know, the only difference between a BA and a BS is that the students who are graduated with a BS often need to work in a research lab for a year and then write a paper about the research. The paper for a BA can be about any topic related to my major (e.g. survey, etc.) as long as it is supervised/tutored by a professor.</p>
<p>Or, would it be fine as long as I keep up may stats (MCAT and GPA), e.g., in the top 10 percents of my graduating class, and a "reasonably good" MCAT score? Although I have gone to a top-10 research university, somehow I am not very very into a research, if I have a choice of not having to do it.</p>
<p>My goal is to get into ANY public medical school in my state and luckily, I am not a California resident.</p>
<p>The difference between the two at my college was that the BA had a foreign language requirement and the BS required additional science (social sciences counted) outside the major. If you’re planning on studying abroad, BA might be the way to go. I did a BS because I already had done four years of Spanish in high school, didn’t plan on going abroad, and was interested in psychology.</p>
<p>No one cares if it’s a BA or BS. Some colleges offer only BA degrees. Others offer BS and BA. Different colleges have different requirements for each degree. </p>
<p>Med school adcoms do not have the time to unravel the differences between all the students with BA and BS degrees in biology, so the end result is that they’re treated as being the same.</p>
<p>I am a more lucky one if what you said is true ;-)</p>
<p>I do not understand why everybody seems to believe that TX medical schools appear to be easier to get into when some evidence shows that many matriculants have quite high GPAs. Not long ago, I pointed out on another thread that many top students from Tx A&M who were admitted into TX medical schools had 4.0 GPAs. It is extremely difficult to get straight A in every class. Granted, not all Tx medical school matriculants have very high MCAT scores, as compared to those in the prestigious private medical schools.</p>
<p>Another question: Do most premeds at your school tend to have higher GPA than non-premeds? Suppose that there are 300 premeds and also 300 prelaws from your school. Do you think more premeds than prelaws would have a GPA > 3.9 (or 3.8)? Recently, there is an article on our school’s newspaper in which people were discussing (or arguing) whether it is more difficult to be a top premed student or a top prelaw student. There seems to be no agreement among two groups of students who have the opposite opinion. It is generally agreed though that the law school admission is more number-centric while premed needs more than just the numbers.</p>
<p>Prelaw students at my school have lower GPA’s than premeds (average for a prelaw applicant is 3.3; don’t know what it is for premeds, but it’s definitely higher).</p>
<p>Prelaw apps (outside of the top 3 law schools) is substantially easier than med school apps, whether you’re talking about the length of the application cycle (a year for med school, only a few weeks for decisions for law school), the cost (mandatory in-person interviews for med schools), acceptance rates (all but the top couple of law schools have acceptance rates over 10%; meanwhile only around 10 out of the top 50 med schools have acceptance rates over 10%), average GPA, or the number of factors considered (LSAT mainly for law school; a host of factors for med school). </p>
<p>With a standardized test score in the 98th percentile, a 3.9 college GPA, I pretty much would’ve gotten into any law school (except the top 3) that I applied to. Meanwhile, in the med school apps process, I got into a whopping 5 out of 25 schools and couldn’t even get interviews at some of my state schools (like UC Irvine).</p>
<p>^ This is what I would believe, but I just want to confirm it with somebody who is more knowledable than me. Thanks, NCG!</p>
<p>It may not be a coincidence that the only two top students mentioned in the article I referred to above are premed’s. Another example is that, a few years ago, one prelaw student who I happen to know, had good shares of Bs, but still managed to get into HLS. He is not an ethnically minority, but he does have a relatively good ECs (an officer of some top-20 club for a year). He said he had to cut a lot classes because of this relatively intense club activity. He might be good at LSAT though.</p>
<p>I only know what my GPA is relative to the whole class in my year (This is because each year the school will publish the GPA cutoff for summa, magna, etc.) But I have no idea how I am ranked among my premed peers in my department or my school. No such reference data point is available to me, and I think it is almost impossible to find it out. I now believe that if I am top X percents of my class, I may be only top 2<em>X or even top 3</em>X percents among the premeds.</p>