<p>I think GPA might not be so all-important. From one LAC’s site:
I think 3.1 is mentioned because it is the campus-wide average GPA. It doesn’t say which med schools accepted the applicants.</p>
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<p>… and it going all the way back to 1995. And its progressively gotten harder since then. You would be hard-pressed to find someone getting in with 3.1/28 combination (w/o an SMP or something), at least to an allopathic school. </p>
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<p>Ditto cdz.</p>
<p>Yep, U of M is actually her “dream” school with #2 being Case Western. If I can convince her to apply to others, maybe she will. As of right now, as you mentioned, she does not want to. It will all, however, depend on her MCAT, which she will take next spring. The absolute minimum of 27 will get her into State school - she has quaranteed spot. She will apply to others if she gets above 35 or so, still retaining her spot. I understand, this is very high score.</p>
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vossron: I think that it is still important to an extent that it should not be lower than some threshold. That is, if your grade is below some number for a particular medical school, it will hurt. BTW, is the LAC you referred to a top LAC? I heard some LACs tend to hand out lower grades. (e.g. Reed, Swarthmore. It is rumored the latter has a grand total of one student applying without a gap year in one particular year, and that applicant’s GPA may be nowhere near 4.0, considering how tough the grading it may be at that school.)</p>
<p>On the other hand, I also heard that there are much more applicants with very high GPAs than those with very high MCAT scores. From one public college that I happen to be familiar with, I heard that there were like 15 premed students who were graduated with 4.0 in one year. I read somewhere not long ago that the top 10 percents of the applicants to two of the public medical schools in my state have a 4.0 GPA. If they choose to do so, their whole class can be the students with a 4.0 GPA.</p>
<p>^ The data is for Reed. I’m trying to find out if more recent data is available.</p>
<p>^ No wonder. Steve Jobs’ alma mater! (Wait…he went there but not graduated.)</p>
<p>Some of these LACs have very high proportion of students who continue on to get their Ph. D. It seems to me that some graduate schools (not necessarily professional schools though) know that the academic preparation of the students from some of these schools are good even though their grades are not necessarily that good. To go to graduate school, the preparation is somehwat different: research, research and research, and take as many advanced courses as possible. The grades need to be decent but it is not the main focus. (It is rumored that for some majors, GRE, unlike MCAT, is definitely not so important. Some students may prepare for their GRE aptitude test for a couple of days only, if any.)</p>
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<p>[Underrepresented</a> in Medicine Definition - AAMC](<a href=“http://www.aamc.org/meded/urm/start.htm]Underrepresented”>http://www.aamc.org/meded/urm/start.htm)</p>
<p>"On March 19, 2004, the AAMC Executive Committee adopted a clarification to its definition of “underrepresented in medicine” titled The status of the new AAMC definition of ‘underrepresented in medicine’ (PDF, 2 pages) following the Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter.</p>
<p>The AAMC definition of underrepresented in medicine is:</p>
<p>“Underrepresented in medicine means those racial and ethnic populations that are underrepresented in the medical profession relative to their numbers in the general population.”</p>
<p>Adopted by the AAMC’s Executive Council on June 26, 2003, the definition helps medical schools accomplish three important objectives:</p>
<pre><code>* a shift in focus from a fixed aggregation of four racial and ethnic groups to a continually evolving underlying reality. The definition accommodates including and removing underrepresented groups on the basis of changing demographics of society and the profession,
- a shift in focus from a national perspective to a regional or local perspective on underrepresentation, and
- stimulate data collection and reporting on the broad range of racial and ethnic self-descriptions.
</code></pre>
<p>Before June 26, 2003, the AAMC used the term “underrepresented minority (URM),” which consisted of Blacks, Mexican-Americans, Native Americans (that is, American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians), and mainland Puerto Ricans. The AAMC remains committed to ensuring access to medical education and medicine-related careers for individuals from these four historically underrepresented racial/ethnic groups."</p>
<p>So, while the definition of underserved in medicine has been broadened so that it is flexible enough to cover evolving demographics, currently the only Hispanic communities that are underserved in medicine are M-A and PR.</p>
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<p>Unless you stratify by GPA, this kind of data is meaningless. Perhaps there were 10 students with GPA’s b/w 3.1 and 3.5 and 118 applicants with GPA’s above 3.5. In fact, this is likely to be true because med school applicants tend to have above average GPA’s. You wouldn’t expect a uniform distribution of GPA’s from 3.1 to 4.0.</p>
<p>Secondly, as someone already mentioned, the average GPA of matriculants has risen from 1995 to 2008.</p>
<p>Well GPA for each school is really different. At Johns Hopkins, I know that their average GPA to students accepted to med school is 3.3 and these students are good students. it’s just that JHU courses are harder than other school and sometimes there are grade deflation and bad curves. So really schools look at your classes and the individual grade and then the school difficulty rather than looking at the GPA alone</p>
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<p>I have some doubt that this would be the case. If one university is a well recognized one but the other university is a podunk one, yes, there will be some adjustment. For schools of similar caliber, I doubt the admission officers will split their hair to decide which one is “harder”. They can afford not to do so, as they have much more qualified applicants than they can admit.</p>
<p>Many students who “survive” the premed classes at many schools (not only JHU) are good students. I do not buy into the notion that JHU undergraduate is harder than Berkeley, Duke, Stanford, etc., just because their medical school is top notch.</p>
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<p>This is sound logic, mcat, but from what I’ve seen, JHU undergrad really IS harder. Not because their medical school is top notch (otherwise Stanford, etc. would also be vicious for undergrad). Everything I’ve seen – admittedly, this is only anecdotal – but it really does seem tougher than anyplace besides MIT.</p>
<p>Your point is taken, because “you have eaten more salt than I have eaten rice” on this topic 
BTW, in case this is not clear: What I quoted here is a saying from another culture, meaning that you have much more experiences than I do in this area. (Hopefully, some of you from the same culture heard it before ;-))</p>
<p>But if we accept the premise of some schools being more difficult than the others, it opens up a pandora box: Which school/program is “better” for premed (in terms of “how easy it is or how likely it would enable you to get into ANY Medical School”)?</p>
<p>This question, which seems to be asked again and again by high schoolers here, can not be easily brushed off with a general statement like “It all depends on the indivisual, your own capability/strength/motivation/interests, etc.” I believe you yourself contributed a lot to a related thread on this forum in the past.</p>
<p>It seems to me that compared to students from many other comparable (i.e., private) schools, more JHU premed students complain about how tough (and also miserable?) their lives are. I recently bumped into a thread on CC where so many current JHU students bash their own school. Somebody (who is a happy one from the often-mentioned happy place: Brown) jokes that it is not JHU itself that is the problem; it is the students who are attracted there.</p>
<p>This makes me think of a question: Assume that having a high concentration of premeds would make the atmosphere unpleasant, should we avoid a school that has too high concentration of premeds? (There are some down side of having too few premeds, of course.)</p>
<p>Even for a relatively small school like JHU (~1000 students per class), a premed there said almost 90 percents of his classes that he ever took have 150-200 students. A problem that I see (my speculation here) is that he may have APed out most of non-premed courses (because he is such a “highly motivated” premed and do not want to “waste time” there), and there are very few enjoyable smaller classes that can serve as a stress releaser.</p>
<p>This is too big a problem for me to tackle. At least there is one statement that may be true: JHU and MIT appear to be harder than the rest. (As far as programs/majors are concerned, a similar question is that whether BME appears to be harder than the rest, excluding those traditional engineering majors like Chemical/Electrical/Mechanical Engineering and maybe a few really hardcore physical sciences like physics/chemistry.)</p>
<p>Actually, the applications for medical school actually are reviewed more than applications to undergrad school. They take more time to took at applications for medical school and they are often reviewed more than once.
Most notification of acceptance takes about three to four month since the interview. During that time they carefully look over your application. It makes little sense if they are going to have admissions officials look over two application and give up because they have the same GPA, it just doesn’t make sense and it would also say that the med school isn’t a good one.
I didn’t really mean their classes are “harder” as in difficult, I meant that it is harder with curves and grade deflation (mainly depends on the class you take but also your major). A good amount of students at JHU that apply for med school are BME majors, and BME is extremely hard to get a good grade in because the classes are so difficult. and this also goes for Duke.
Also I hope you learned in high school that different schools have different way of calculating GPA, I can’t imagine that the admissions officer would simply look over those application because two students have the same GPA. What happens if one of those students took 10 AP and the other took only 1? They simply overlook it because they have much more students? NO. And note that schools like Duke this year received over 20,000 applications and I bet you that none were simply overlooked because they had the same GPA as another.
Med school has about 5,000-7,000 application, depending on which one you go to, that’s 3-4 times less than undergrad admissions. Each college also has their own way of calculating GPA (UM has a different way of calculating GPA than Duke). So I would think that they would have more time to look over each application. And I’m sure you learned in school that each school has its own notion of difficulty and course grading. I’m pretty sure that if a school like grade deflation (like Princeton), then the med school officials would know that it is harder to get a good grade because there is many people competing for one grade.
It wouldn’t make sense for admissions officers to not put their time in to see which one is harder, they have gone through billions of applications and they pretty much know each school (med school admissions officials are not just any admissions official that they picked off the street, these admissions officials have years and decades of experience, they know almost what each school is like and they know which one is harder in difficulty and which one is harder in admissions).
If you look at JHU’s website, it says that the average GPA of their accepted applications are 3.55 and that 88% of students that were accepted had a GPA of 3.3 or higher. I just can’t imagine that the admissions officials would simply bypass their application because it would cause them to have to think harder. These officials are trained and understand each school, I highly doubt they would accept a student also with a 3.55 GPA and comes from a school. I highly doubt that JHU is easier than state schools (with the exception of Berkeley and UM). Also I highly doubt that JHU has classes that are 150-200 student’s, I wonder what the other teachers are doing then (a 150-200 class is impossible, I highly doubt there is even a classroom to fit them).
I mean seriously, admissions director HAVE to look at individual course grades and they weight their decisions on how difficult the school and what the students got in the individual classes. GPA means little, its which courses you take and what you go in them. Do your homework, I mean seriously I just can’t imagine a admission director simply overlook a 3.75 GPA student from Harvard just because another student got a 3.8 in a state school, that’s just ridiculous.
[JHU</a> Pre-Professional Advising](<a href=“Pre-Professional Advising | Student Affairs”>Pre-Professional Advising | Student Affairs)
Also I would like you to know that JHU has less than 30% of their students as premed, again do you homework before posting. Read this thread, AdmissionsDaniel (who is a admissions official at JHU even says that only about 20% of the students are premed so you “high concentration” belief is totally wrong. <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/johns-hopkins-university/720375-how-many-freshman-students-pre-med.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/johns-hopkins-university/720375-how-many-freshman-students-pre-med.html</a></p>
<p>No school is a full ride to Med school, even Harvard isn’t and trust me, a UM kid can have a chance to get into a JHU med school better than a Yale kid even.
I have talked to a person who just loved JHU, he got accepted into Duke Med school, I believe the “thread” that you saw was only a tiny population of the whole school, different student have different views about the school they attend, there are Harvard students who just doesn’t like Harvard and that applies to every school. I think you have a stereotype on JHU, just because a small group of students don’t like it, it doesn’t apply to everyone. And trust me admissions officials look over EVERY one of the applications, even if they have the same GPA, I can’t imagine the top med school officials just simply bypassing a application because they have the same GPA and don’t want to look at the individual course grade and the difficulty of the course and school</p>
<p>Engineering majors appear not to do any worse in medical school admissions than others; that much I can assure you of. Hopkins is one school where medical school admissions data is very hard to come by, because of their screening process.</p>
<p>If the poster somewhere on this board (this thread?) mentioned that Hopkins’ average GPA of admits was about 3.3; if this is true, then that’s a promising sign.</p>
<p>The “perfect metric,” which I do not have, would (I think) be this: after controlling for MCAT score and the specific medical school, which schools have the lowest GPA of admits relative to the distribution of GPAs given out by the school? I don’t have that data for any school – not even my alma mater – and until I have it, I can’t say definitively that some schools are worse than others.</p>
<p>I totally agree with bluedevilmike. Every school is different in difficulty, JHU has a harder BME than any other school (maybe with the exception of Duke, I know Duke got its prestige because it is extremely tough, one of toughest major in Duke). Why? because it is very vigorous, I highly doubt they got their prestige from just sitting around. I bet you that JHU life and physical science is more difficult than the school you go to mcat2.</p>
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This is all probably true, although of course most notification of undergrad acceptances also takes months and months. The driving force is how small a medical school class is: at something like 140 kids, they can’t give away spots the same way an undergraduate class of thousands can.</p>
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Not sure exactly what this means.</p>
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Actually this doesn’t matter. AMCAS takes all the GPAs and standardizes them, so that medical schools don’t have to worry about it.</p>
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<p>No, this is not correct. Medical schools usually don’t have any full-time admissions staff, so the smaller application load isn’t what drives the extra time. It’s the fact that they have such smaller classes.</p>
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Probably true.</p>
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Ah, I revise the statement I looked at above. This is good detective work from you.</p>
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This is true. I would assert with very high confidence that Hopkins is definitely harder.</p>
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No, this is incorrect. There are TONS of classrooms that will be big enough to fit that many, and such classes are pretty commonplace even at Yale and Princeton, much less Hopkins.</p>
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<p>I hope what you bet is true. This is because I always prefer to go to a school that has “the right level of difficulty.” I have long passed those high school days when I had the desire to “break the curve.” – not possible for me anyway unless I sacrifice too much in my social life when you have so many top gunners who “don’t sleep.”</p>
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<p>I would agree with you that “they weigh the decision on how difficult the school is.” – That is the reason I do not want my kid to go to a school that is too “easy.” But it is still hard for me to believe that they would pay much attention to individual classes and what their grades are. (Yes, I do know it is important to take many challenging courses in high school, as my kid took like 10 APs with all 5 on them many years ago. His so-called Academic Index was like one point lower than the highest number.) The reason is that the course with the same or similar name may be quite different in its difficulty at different school. Even at the same school, the difficulty level may vary depending on which professor happens to teach it in a given year. When you happens to have a “difficult/demanding” professor, you just need to tough it out (what else can you do?)</p>
<p>Regarding your comment/suggestion on “do your home work”, I admit that I personally did not do much homework other than lurking on this forum. Much of what I wrote above is just my somewhat subjective opinions based on what I have learned on this forum. Therefore, what I wrote may not be correct. When I am corrected, I would appreciate it, as this may help me understand the issue better.</p>
<p>Oh…yes, there are many large introductory science classes. This is what I know for sure. I read an article some time ago that there are like 600 aspiring life science majors in freshmen at Harvard and the school then tries to divide that concentration into several sub-concentrations to improve the situation.</p>
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<p>The ADCOMs I know dont look at individual courses, only the GPA. They don’t have time to decided which class is hard at which school. They just go by what the AMCAS screeners decide is the applicants GPA.</p>
<p>ASMAJ, we kinda debated on this already. You simply just can’t say a student who has a 3.8 in a state school is better than a Harvard kid who has a 3.6</p>
<p>Also they don’t decide which class is harder, they decide which school is harder overall, this makes it so when they look at the individual classes they know how hard it is (please refer back to the past few posts that we wrote and read them)</p>