<p>I am not arguing that life ought to be fair.</p>
<p>My argument is that premeds - society's future doctors - should do whatever it takes to improve the overall pool of doctors, NOT their own futures. That means getting the best education possible; that means not exploiting loopholes in the system.</p>
<p>My apologies, sakky, when I said "you had better adapt..." I meant that towards any pre-med in general. Not you, sorry. </p>
<p>BDM has it down right. For the future patient, we need an overall excellent pool of doctors.</p>
<p>I agree that BDM's motives are noble. However, I would still highlight the blame on the adcoms. They are the ones who are distorting the process. Right now, there are plenty of candidates who would make for excellent doctors, but they never get a chance because the adcoms don't admit them. At the same time, they turn around and admit people of quite poor character and who are highly opportunistic. That's the heart of the problem.</p>
<p>so sakky, by promoting underhanded methods of trying to play the system you are only encouraging more and more people who are "of quite poor character" and are "highly opportunistic" and are in fact part of the problem which u are saying exists.</p>
<p>No, you have to put the cart in front of the horse.</p>
<p>The reason why opportunism occurs is because the adcoms let it occur. After all, if the adcoms really were careful about who they admit, then there would be no incentive to be opportunistic Nobody would go around cherry-picking their way through easy classes and avoiding difficult ones because they know that it wouldn't make any difference.</p>
<p>The point is, if you want to solve the problem, you have to get to the root of it, and extirpate that root. Premeds did not create the problem, the adcoms did. They are the ones who should be held responsible.</p>
<p>no no, this isnt a one way street. I blame the premeds as much as i blame the adcoms. The adcoms can only do so much. They dont know what every class in every school is like....they dont know if that hospital volunteer was real or whether it was just a friend of ur father's who signed a paper that u spent however many hours there....they dont know how intensive a course is at every one of the 3000 colleges around the nation. The fact that you advocate the problem makes it harder to fix it at the "root".</p>
<p>Come on. For the most part, adcoms don't know because they don't WANT to know. For example, any reasonably educated person ought to understand that, for example, MIT and Caltech are extremely difficult schools. Or that engineering or physics are more difficult majors than Leisure Studies is. But the adcoms don't see these things that even reasonably educated people understand. These are obvious, but they don't see it. It's because they don't want to see it. They deliberately CHOOSE to not see it. </p>
<p>For example, when the average GPA of admitted premeds at MIT or Caltech are no lower, and in fact sometimes HIGHER than that of admitted students from other, easier, schools, that means that adcoms are not giving no acknowledgement to the fact that these schools are difficult. It's because they don't want to acknowlege. They choose not to. It's a deliberate choice on their part.</p>
<p>This is the sort of thing that makes people game the system. People see these sorts of games that the adcoms are playing, and they decide to play along. It will never stop until the adcoms stop. Basically, the adcoms choose to play games, and so the candidates play games in response. It's the adcoms who have the ultimate power. When they reward gamers, that simply encourages more gamers. </p>
<p>I agree that the adcoms will never have perfect information and will never be able to eliminate gaming completely . But there are just some simple steps that they could do. For example, again, accounting for the fact that some schools are more difficult than others by applying a GPA-multiplier. The fact that they don't even bother to perform even these simple steps indicates that they don't care. They're not interested in fixing the problem.</p>
<p>But the adcoms didn't create that problem either - US News gives them their incentive. People buying the magazines gives THEM that incentive. Residencies needing fast information have THAT incentive. Patients wanting to know about hospitals have incentive to use THAT information.</p>
<p>Don't you see, sakky, all parties share blame - because all parties contribute to the problem! It all stems from basic lack of information and time constraints. (In economic terms, "Search Costs".)</p>
<p>In any case, if I were talking to adcoms on this board, I would scold them for not paying better attention. If I were talking to US News, I would scold them for overemphasizing GPA.</p>
<p>But I'm not. You and I are talking to premeds, and it's only appropriate for us to be disappointed in their hypercompetition and loophole exploitation, not to encourage it!</p>
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But the adcoms didn't create that problem either - US News gives them their incentive. People buying the magazines gives THEM that incentive. Residencies needing fast information have THAT incentive. Patients wanting to know about hospitals have incentive to use THAT information.
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<p>I had thought about this before, but I tend to think this is overblown. While I don't have the data on this, I strongly suspect that adcoms had been behaving like this long before USNews got into the business of ranking graduate schools. Keep in mind that USNews has been ranking med-schools only since the early 90's or late 80's. Yet consider the experience of Michael Crichton at Harvard when he was a premed in the 1960's:</p>
<p>"In general, I found Harvard an exciting place, where people were genuinely focused on study and learning, and with no special emphasis on grades. But to take a premed course was to step into a different world -- nasty and competitive. The most critical course was organic chemistry, Chem 20, and it was widely known as a "screw your buddy" course. In lectures, if you didn't hear what the instructor had said and asked the person next to you, he'd give you the wrong information; thus you were better off leaning over to look at his notes, but in that case he was likely to cover his notes so you couldn't see. In the labs, if you asked the person at the next bench a question, he'd tell you the wrong answer in the hope that you would make a mistake or, even better, start a fire. We were marked down for starting fires. In my year, I had the dubious distinction of starting more lab fires than anyone else, including a spectacular ether fire that set the ceiling aflame and left large scorch marks, a stigmata of ineptitude hanging over my head for the rest of the year. I was uncomfortable with the hostile and paranoid attitude this course demanded for success. I thought that a humane profession like medicine ought to encourage other values in its candidates. But nobody was asking my opinion. I got through it as best I could. "</p>
<p>So it's now decades later, and looks like nothing has changed. Premed is just as cutthroat and grade-conscious as it ever was. Hence, I doubt that rankings had a whole lot to do with it. Seems to me that med-school adcoms and premed-curriculas have been the way they are for decades.</p>
<p>First, I suppose I should have been more specific: schools have an incentive to advertise that their students have high GPAs and whatnot all the time. USN may have advertised that more publicly, but they've always had this.</p>
<p>Second, I don't understand why the fact that premeds are cutthroat implies that schools have always ignored difficulty of coursework.</p>
<p>Medical schools don't care about their USNews ranking. No one talks about it, no one notices it. All med schools are swamped with applications from overqualified applicants. USNews ranking criteria have so little to do with the way medical school quality is viewed inside the profession that no one cares.</p>
<p>On the other hand, medical schools know that people with higher GPA's do better in med school. People with higher MCAT's do better in med school. Selectivity of the college from which they graduated does not contribute to this prediction, provided you already have their gpa and MCAT's. So medical schools ignore college selectivity because it offers no additional information. </p>
<p>If there is a payoff to going to a tougher school, it may be that you learn more, and do better on the MCAT's. Even that is not assured however. Places like Caltech and MIT do not have memorizing the answers to basic questions -such as those on the MCAT- as a goal for their students. They want their students to think like scientists, and be prepared to analyze deep complicated questions to which no one knows the answers. There are no questions like that on the MCAT. So a graduate of a second tier state college might be better prepared to take this sort of test than a good student from Caltech. If you asked them both to prove some theorems, or solve challenging problems in quantum mechanics there would be no contest, but this has nothing to do with medical school or medical practice.</p>
<p>I suspect the experience of people from the pure tech schools has more to do with the sort of education they have had being a poor match for medical practice. Medicine is people work, and the schools would rather have someone who was doing "people" stuff in college-acting in plays, being on a team, writing for the newspaper, than someone who spent all her time locked in the library doing problem sets. The schools know quite well that all of the graduates of Caltech and MIT know more about science than they need to be doctors, so that is not the point. The question is whether they know enough about people for choosing medicine to be appropriate for them.</p>
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I suspect the experience of people from the pure tech schools has more to do with the sort of education they have had being a poor match for medical practice. Medicine is people work, and the schools would rather have someone who was doing "people" stuff in college-acting in plays, being on a team, writing for the newspaper, than someone who spent all her time locked in the library doing problem sets. The schools know quite well that all of the graduates of Caltech and MIT know more about science than they need to be doctors, so that is not the point. The question is whether they know enough about people for choosing medicine to be appropriate for them.
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<p>I have heard this argument before, and I'm afraid that it doesn't hold water for me. You say that MIT and Caltech students may not have people skills. Fair enough. So then the answer would then be to bring them in for interviews and/or to examine their secondary app for evidence of volunteer work/leadership experience, and so forth. If it is determined that, from that evidence, they don't have people skills, then fair enough, reject them. But that's not how it happens. These guys get rejected in the FIRST ROUND, which is a purely numerical round. In other words, they are getting rejected because of their numbers, even before anybody has ever had a chance to assess their people skills. </p>
<p>
[quote]
If there is a payoff to going to a tougher school, it may be that you learn more, and do better on the MCAT's. Even that is not assured however. Places like Caltech and MIT do not have memorizing the answers to basic questions -such as those on the MCAT- as a goal for their students. They want their students to think like scientists, and be prepared to analyze deep complicated questions to which no one knows the answers. There are no questions like that on the MCAT. So a graduate of a second tier state college might be better prepared to take this sort of test than a good student from Caltech. If you asked them both to prove some theorems, or solve challenging problems in quantum mechanics there would be no contest, but this has nothing to do with medical school or medical practice.
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<p>This, I don't particularly buy either. After all, one could use the same logic to question the entire pre-med curriculum. How many doctors go around writing out O-Chem reactions, including electron attack mechanisms and so forth in their daily lives? How many of them calculate physics problems, like if a car has a certain constant acceleration, how far will that car travel in 10 seconds? The truth is, most of the premed curricula is never actually USED by doctors in their daily work. What they do use are things like anatomy or physiology. So if the objection is that MIT/Caltech'er are not learning appropriate things for medicine, then you could say the same for all premeds. Premeds should instead be forced to prove themselves in classes in anatomy or physiology. </p>
<p>{As a sidenote, consider this thought exercise. Let's take a guy who does the premed coursework and does terrible at it, i.e. gets straight C's. But then that guy continues and gets straight A's in advanced BioChem and Cell Biology and Anatomy and Physiology upper division coursework. We all know that this person is probably not going to get into med-school because of his bad premed coursework. But why? Who cares if he screwed up his lower-division premed stuff? His top grades in the upper-division stuff are far more relevant to medical work. I would argue that getting top grades in advanced Biochem and Anatomy is far more indicative of a good doctor than getting top grades in lower division physics and chemistry. But the med-school adcoms don't care about that. They have ARBITRARILY decided that the premed coursework is the coursework that matters. If there's a better alternative, they don't care. And to me, that's just indicative of simple organizational laziness. You know that he's good. But you just don't want to know it. }</p>
<p>Hence, getting back to the topic, I would have to say that I have to puncture this stereotype of the nerdy MIT/Caltech'er with no social skills. Especially when it comes to MIT. The fact is, MIT is a quite broad university with many majors available, some that demand significant people skills. For example, the Sloan School of Management at MIT is one of the top business schools in the world. Those MIT undergrads who choose to complete their major at Sloan have little choice but to become highly social. The class grades are heavily weighted towards class participation, public presentations, and team projects. If you're not a good public speaker and you're not aggressive enough to speak up during class and work well in teams, you won't do well at Sloan. The same could be said for MIT's highly respected Political Science program. Don't laugh at MIT's poli-sci program - USNews ranks MIT's polisci department as #10 in the nation, tied with Columbia, and beating out Penn, Cornell, Northwestern, Georgetown, Emory, Vanderbilt, and Virginia. MIT has a top-tier philosophy program and psychology program (it's called Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, but that's just a fancy name for psychology), as well as architecture and urban planning. And of course MIT has world-class Economics and Linguistics programs. All of these majors requires significant 'talking' and people skills in order to do well in, because of the many team projects and class discussion you need.</p>
<p>Finally, let's talk about Biology. We all know that the plurality of premeds at any school are bio majors. It's highly unclear to me that the Bio majors at MIT are any more nerdy and antisocial than the Bio majors at any other school. It's not like the MIT Bio classes have you calculating the quantum mechanics of enzyme catalysis. Look, Bio is Bio is Bio. You can look at OCW and convince yourself that MIT Bio classes teach you the same content as Bio classes at Harvard or Stanford. That's why somebody like molliebatmit, who majored in Bio at MIT, can get into the PhD Bio programs at Harvard and Stanford (in addition to MIT). No matter whether you study Bio at MIT or at Harvard or Stanford, it's the same memorization, the same content. </p>
<p>The point is, if you make an apples-to-apples comparison, I don't think that there is any significant difference between an MIT premed and a premed at Harvard or any other elite school. The only workable difference is the grades. Again, take molliebatmit. She "only" got a 3.5/4 at MIT. I say "only" because those are fantastic grades for an MIT student. She's a varsity cheerleader. She's a leader of a great many activities. I don't think anybody could say that she doesn't have people skills. Look through her old posts and you can convince yourself that she is a highly vibrant and 'together' woman. Yet the fact that she "only" has a 3.5/4 would mean that she would have difficulty getting into med-school. On the other hand, she got into practically all of the top PhD Bio programs. </p>
<p>The point is, if you really suspect that somebody at MIT doesn't have people skills, then at least give them the chance to present their secondary app to demonstrate their EC's. They don't do that. Plenty of med-schools would have rejected molliebatmit in the first round even before she got the chance to write about her cheerleading experience and other social experiences. So once again, it's not just that the med-schools don't know about those candidates, it's that they don't WANT to know about them.</p>
<p>Sakky,
Well argued. Makes me want to interview my personal doctors a little more carefully! It is also why I keep telling my son to choose an undergraduate major that he is really interested in and can make a career out of, because with the numbers game med school may not be in his future whether he is well qualified or not.</p>
<p>I am a freshman in college, but here's what i think.</p>
<p>Students in ivy leagues and other good schools have some advantages...a better study setting because all the neighbors in your dorm are studying at 2am and that prompts you to study too lol...
and, it's usually true that these students have +0.2 bumper factor in GPA (3.6 is about the same as 3.8 in lower tier universities)..thirdly, if you go to a grade-inflated school, you have a high gpa plus that bumper factor, plus that help with MCAT plus the research opportunities.</p>