“kids who grubbed high GPAs”
I think “grinded” fits better here.
I don’t have much data specifically for Yale, but the data I have for other highly selective colleges does not suggest a big difference in outcomes between 3.9x for different x’s, in the listed fields for which publications are available. For example, the most recent average GPA on gradeinflation.com for Yale and WUSTL are within 0.1 from each, both selective private colleges without large grade inflation. WUSTL posts med school admission results for their undergrad class by GPA and MCAT at http://prehealth.wustl.edu/Documents/HANDBOOK.pdf . For applicants with a MCAT of 30+ (30 is far below average at WUSTL), acceptance rate by GPA is below:
3.8 to 4.0 - 95%
3.6 to 3.79 - 91%
3.4 to 3.59 - 84%
3.2 to 3.39 - 79%
It’s not just the 3.9x students at the top of their class who are getting in to med school. There is little difference in admit rate between the 3.6+ GPA group and the 3.8+ GPA group. The numbers are close enough that the difference in admit rate may relate to correlations with other portions of the application rather than the GPA itself. For example, the higher GPA group may be more likely to have impressive LORs, impressive research and other ECs, or being more likely to be on the upper end of the 30+ MCAT score, etc. Even members of the class who had a GPA well below average for the college had a high med school admit rate. Would Yale really be that different from WUSTL, such that Yale grades would need a 3.9x GPA for med school?
Law school scattergrams rarely show a notable difference in outcome for GPA’s that high. For example, a scattergram for Harvard Law is at http://harvard.lawschoolnumbers.com/stats/1415 . The admission decisions form a line such that anyone whose GPA + LSAT/15 > 15.3 is admitted. With this simple line model, the difference between a 3.85 and 3.95 GPA would only impact applicants who score exactly 171 on the LSAT, a very small portion of the overall pool.
"For applicants with a MCAT of 30+ (30 is far below average at WUSTL), acceptance rate by GPA is below:
3.8 to 4.0 - 95%
3.6 to 3.79 - 91%
3.4 to 3.59 - 84%
3.2 to 3.39 - 79%"
Wow, I didn’t realize that the acceptance rate to med school was so high. 79-95% of applicants who apply to med school get accepted to med school?
This thread just reminded me that my husband had a classmate at brown who didn’t graduate with Latin honors, so wasn’t at the top of his class, but went on to grad school for a STEM phd. He later won a Nobel prize. There’s a video of one of his profs discussing what he was like as an undergrad. Definitely not the type to protect his GPA, but certainly someone who thought out-of-the-box. I wonder how many grad school committees might overlook someone like this nowadays bc he doesn’t have the requisite gpa. But he’s one in a million.
I only took one history class as an undergrad. Think I got a 4.0 in it though.
Research interest/fit, writing sample, and previous research experience were the most important things in the application I think.
^that’s good to hear.
i just want to say that while he has felt pressured to worry more about his GPA, his mother and I have had him for more years than his classmates have, so our values are still in the lead 
@al2simon, thank you for your kind thoughts. He is learning to relax about grades, and I get the occasional text: “I f___ing love Yale.” I forgot to teach him not to curse
The fact that med school admissions require many “almost mandatory checked list” items makes the “grade efficiency” more important than getting high GPAs.
It is commonly said that as long as both GPA and MCAT are high enough, any increase on either of these two metrics (esp. the latter) will not affect the outcome very much. Not sure if this is true though.
Many students (if they are naturally good at aptitude and/or achievement tests) may try to dedicate as much time and efforts to med school mandatory EC items, while “optimizing” their academic efforts (i.e., being grade efficient by minimizing their efforts on academics while securing “just good enough” academic merit. (There are some exceptions, like those which are gunning for the very limited number of merit-based scholarship.)
Maybe not far in the future, a “good college” may also need to help the students to learn or gain experience in non-academic stuff, considering the fact that interning and doing ECs become more and more a necessity rather than “nice to have.”
I agree with the first half. I am not sure if kids can escape the blame. In some top colleges, students strive to take interesting courses not easy courses. In my kid’s college (top 10), the most popular course is taught by a professor known for tough grading.
Funny that this is brought up - two days ago at an interview for an internship my 4.0 college junior math/econ major was asked if her 4.0 reflected that she was taking only easy classes.
I think the idea of rigor does not exist in college where there is no longer different levels of classes and all classes are weighted the same in your GPA. However, I do think that when evaluating a candidate for a job which classes they took is important so you know what skills they have. (I may be biased as I come from a tech background)
Not quite understanding this. Since all courses weigh equally in GPA, wouldn’t rigor matters more? At any rate, at my kid’s college there are parellel sessions of a course with different professors teaching. I was quite impressed to hear that a session taught by an effective prefessor with tough standards closed out first due to over enrollment.
You don’t think employers know the difference between “organizational behavior” classes and a quant based valuation class, even though both get the same rating value in the GPA? Employers don’t know what econometrics is vs. a “topics in economics” class which doesn’t even have a math prerequisite???
Directed Studies at Yale is a good indicator of rigor (it’s known as “Direct Suicide”). A Freshman who opts for that, over retaking the equivalent of classes he or she took in HS is in good stead to demonstrate rigor, regardless of the eventual GPA.
I don’t do grad admissions for a living, but I have observed numerous cases (including my own kids) where rigor seems to count for a hell of a lot more than the matrices published on the internet about who gets in where with what.
MIT used to publish tables for both med school and law school admissions (academic PhD stats are harder to come by, especially since it’s more about who you’ve worked with and the kind of work you’ve done and I think GRE’s at that level are pretty irrelevant. The math is too easy to be meaningful) which seem to show that a decent transcript from MIT gets you into a lot of places (assuming strong scores on either LSAT or MCAT) that you shouldn’t be getting into, based on the “published” stats. I can only conjecture that the core- which is identical whether you are studying political science, urban planning or econ vs. mechanical engineering or computer science- serves a proxy for “rigor” in the eyes of adcom’s in professional schools. You don’t need a 3.9 (or its equivalent on MIT’s 5 point scale) to get into competitive grad programs.
@blossom, that’s music to my ears 
My concern was that, while they know the difference, they might not look closely enough and bypass a 3.6 applicant without looking into what he was taking when he got the B+.
But an econ major will be required to take econometrics and most likely the kid taking topics in economics is taking it to fulfill a social science core requirement. I did say looking at what classes they took is important - I would think that the classes they took to fulfill their major requirements would be the rigorous ones and then what they filled their schedule with would be stuff they either enjoyed or felt would give them some knowledge that they thought would be useful. Isn’t the point of core requirements across many disciplines to broaden your horizons - so taking topics in economics as a bio major does not lessen your overall rigor in my opinion.
Yale’s cut off for cum laude, magna cl and summa cl give an idea of how much grades at the top of the curve have crept up. That may be of interest to Xnay
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/09/10/latin-honor-cutoffs-inch-toward/
I think that Yale should do what some other schools have done and create an A+ grade for truly superior work. (At least 5 years ago now, Harvard Law reported that 12% of the entering class had UG GPAs above 4.0.) Yale has other ways of signifying outstanding accomplishment. One of them is highest distinction in a major. These are rare.
I don’t think most Yalies choose gut majors–although some do. (Some people are genuinely interested in some of the easier majors.) I think the guts enter into it when filling distribution requirements. The humanities types take the science courses for non-majors. There’s one particular course a large number of science majors used to take to fullfill the social science requirements. ( I don’t know if that’s still the case.) I know this included at least a couple of Goldwater Scholars. It is–or was–just as much of a gut as the science courses for non-science majors.
Yep, if your entire transcript is filled with guts it may hurt you. But choosing guts to meet your distribution requirements probably doesn’t. “Physics for Poets”–again, I don’t know if it still exists–isn’t officially titled that, after all. That’s where gamemanship comes in. It’s not all about grade-grubbing. Some of it is about work load.
I woudn’t rely too much on “lawschoolnumbers.” Reporting is voluntary–limited to the people who use the site. There’s no process for insuring that those who list their GPAs and LSAT scores are being truthful either. And we aren’t done with admissions decisions for this year yet.
YoHo YoHo, Data10’s information on med school acceptance rates applied for undergraduates at WUSTL, not across the board. Also, they applied for students who scored 30+ on the MCAT. So the typical admissions rate for a student with a 3.2-3.4 at another university and an average MCAT score would be much lower.
Not sure if this was true back then. Quite some time ago, a CCer posted that a student from MIT actually needed a higher GPA to get into a med school, as compared to other comparable school.
The only reason that I could think of is that if more international students from MIT decided to apply to med school, it could drag down their acceptance rate. After all, it appears that MIT tends to recruit more international students than a somewhat “comparable” school. Also, some may speculate that students, esp. the international students, from such a college (actually from a few other comparable colleges too) could apply to more harder-to-get-in “top” med schools. After all, at least a few (but not all) top med schools could be slightly less biased against such international students due to their research focus. Also, some people argue that, fair or not, MIT kids could have some “stereotypes” against them regarding whether they would be a “fit” in such a career.
Some actually argued in the past that being from Berkeley could mean a slight uphill battle too, as compared to comparable students from other colleges. If this is also true, the academic rigor, after reaching a certain threshold, may not be as necessary as the quality of EC for which the higher the quality, the better. After all, having an overly heavy course load could take away the student’s valuable time for ECs (and interns for some other careers.) To put it bluntly, as indicated in the case of wustl graduates, if a student has had a “good enough” GPA, it may be “wise” (solely in terms of grade efficiency for getting just good enough GPA) for him/her to allocate more of his/her time for the ECs, not for the “academic rigor.” The “numbers” the professor give out can only carry them so far - the rest (the non-academic credentials) could most likely not come from the professors.
A famed physics professor at our flagship public once complained that the admission of med school kind of causes the phenomenon of “national campaign of “wasting” the greatest brain power” in our nation. Is he biased by over-emphasizing the importance of science for those in this career path? After all, there is an early admission program at a med school in NYC that only takes students that have their focus on humanity (taking certain science courses could instantly disqualify the students from this program, as I heard.) However, some complained that they could more likely take humanity students from elite colleges (who may be better at being “shining stars” in humanity, as compared to the students at state schools – the latter could focus more on other areas.)
People familiar with colleges know that there are “hard” courses and “easy” courses.
However, college course offerings, and what courses students choose to take, are much more variable than in high school. High school students going to very selective colleges are expected to take courses in English, math, history / social studies, science, foreign language, and art / music, which tend to be relatively standardized (and with options of honors courses in many cases), at least in theory (and if the course content is not trusted, there are SAT subject tests and AP tests to give a common measure across high schools). But two different college students may have none of the same courses (and this is sometimes possible even for two students in the same major at the same college). Given the huge number of majors and courses, it would be very difficult for an employer or law school to know which courses are the “hard” and “easy” ones at each college – a “hard” course at one college may correspond to an “easy” course at another. Employers or PhD programs looking at students from particular majors may be familiar within those majors, but not for subjects outside the majors.
Re: WUStL’s high medical school admission rates
Doesn’t WUStL do committee letters? If so, then it may be that WUStL has already pre-screened the medical school applicants and dissuaded those with low chance of admission from applying to medical school at all.
Entirely possible, ucbalumnus. If so, it would be useful to know the actual numbers in the 3.2-3.4, 30+ MCAT group, as well as their admissions odds.