<p>Hey guys , so i went to a state school(say umass amherst), and then acheieved top notch grades, and excellent MCAT scores, will it be hard for me to get into Med school, for example BU medical school etc. does the prestige of the college really matter in general, i udnerstand if i were to stand nex to a harvard applicatn w/ same stats, he would kill me.</p>
<p>thanks</p>
<p>well it depends if the harvard guy took more units or harder courses then he may have a slight advantage. Also Harvard is Harvard and if there is a person w/ similar stats the Harvard guy maay be more prefereable</p>
<p>More likely than not your stats (GPA, MCAT) will be the same as a large number of applicants. What will differentiate you from others will be the E.C's, volunteer work, medical experience, research, etc. If everything is equal, inlcuding everything that I listed and more, then the Harvard guy would have a slight advantage, but keep in mind that no two applicants are equal. </p>
<p>You might have the same GPA and MCAT as the Harvard guy, but you could have more clinical experience or vice versa. </p>
<p>~El Sol</p>
<p>Directly it matters somewhat in med school admissions.</p>
<p>Indirectly, going to a better school should (in theory at least) help you get a better MCAT score because you'll learn more and going to a great research institution like Harvard should provide you with many opportunities to do research.</p>
<p>It could make a difference. I have never seen any real analysis of this. I think where it may make the most difference is in the more selective med schools, the research intensive ones.</p>
<p>However, if you want to get into medical school, any US accredited med school, the most important things are your MCAT scores, your grades and the recs from your college premed committee. I have seen kids with from the top schools (JHU, Cornell) NOT get into ANY medical school after applying to as many 30 school, not even get interviews because their gpas were below a certain threshhold and some of those kids had phenomonal research experience, great ECs, and high MCATs. My daughter's school sends a number of kids to med school each year and it is a small, relatively unknown Catholic college with a nurturing premed program that operates with the purpose of getting every deserving premed into medical school. The grades are a bit inflated, they teach to the MCAT, spend time on the MCAT and the recs are over the top. however, I do notice that there are few, if any, who go to the top research medical schools. But for someone who really wants to be a practicing doctor and does not care about research, this is the surest path. My niece successfully took this route as she will be graduating from med school this June.</p>
<p>Well, if you just look at the numbers, schools like Penn and Dartmouth have like 90% of their grads getting into med school, and national average is likd 50% so....</p>
<p>Statistics can be decieving.</p>
<p>~El Sol</p>
<p>I don't think that going to a top school is going to affect your MCAT score much. Ochem is ochem, bio is bio, physics is physics, and vocab is vocab no matter where you go. Generally speaking (with one important exception that I'll get to later), you're probably not going to learn a heck of a lot more by taking Ochem at Harvard than you would by taking Ochem at Northeast State University. </p>
<p>The exception has to do with environmental motivation. Students tend to be more motivated,harder working, and dedicated to learning at the top schools than at the lower-tier schools, and when the people around you are motivated to learn and are working hard, then you tend to become more motivated to learn and to work hard too, and vice versa. However, presuming the same levels of personal motivation and hard work, then the guy taking premed classes at a no-name school will not learn any less than the Harvard guy taking premed classes. </p>
<p>However, a key difference in terms of premed success that has not yet been fully discussed is grade inflation. Harvard premeds have a big advantage, relative to peer schools, because of grade inflation. Basically, it's practically impossible to flunk out of Harvard and quite rare to get truly mediocre grades. Contrast that with some of the other elite programs where flunking out or otherwise receiving grades that will destroy your med-school chances is a constant danger. This is why places like JHU, Cornell, Caltech, Berkeley, and MIT are actually not good places to go for premed because of their grade deflation, relative to grade-inflated schools like Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Duke, etc. Ideally, if you want to maximize your chances of getting to med-school, especially the elite med-schools, you want to go to a premed program that is highly famous AND has high levels of grade inflation.</p>
<p>Note, don't get me wrong. I don't think this is fair. This is a loophole in the 'game' of med-school admissions. Med-school adcoms should not be rewarding schools who inflate grades. Adcoms should not be rewarding schools that specifically coach their premeds and teach to the MCAT test, or deliberately pad the apps of their premeds with superstar recs that they don't really deserve. But the fact is, they are doing all of these things. So as long as the adcoms continue to make the admissions process a game, then I have no choice but to recommend that if you want to win, you gotta play the game.</p>
<p>MIT grades:</p>
<p>which reports "almost half (49%) of grades assigned to upperclassmen are A's, compared to 22% for freshmen."</p>
<p>This 49% is exactly 1% less than the figure at Harvard</p>
<p>Wherever you go, if you get top grades and MCAT scores you will get into medical school. Of course, most people who go to med school do not have "top" scores. They have, for medical students, average scores. It is not at all clear that coming from one college vs another will improve your admissions chances with average scores.</p>
<p>For example, Cornell students with MCATs of 30 or higher or GPAs of 3.4 or higher do very well, "lack of grade inflation" notwithstanding.</p>
<p>The median grade at Cornell Arts and Sciences is between a B+ and an A-, typical of elite colleges. </p>
<p>Over 40% of grades at Cornell were "A's" in 2000</p>
<p>Cornell does not appear to be any less affected by grade inflation than the other Ivies. Is there evidence that MIT has lower grades?</p>
<p>One problem with med school acceptance stats is that the % accepted is only from those who applied. You don't know who fell on the wayside on the way, could nnot get the heads up from the med committee, got "C's" in O-chem, etc. At certain top premed programs, the drop out rate is high. The scary part of that is that the kids who drop out may well be highly qualified, and had they gone to a more nurturing school without a tough premed gauntlet and grade inflation, they may well have become doctors. Instead they change their majors and are discouraged out of their dream. That is a story the statistics do not tell. Having gone to a school like that, and seen this happen alot, I can tell you this happens often.</p>
<p>I am sure you are right Jamimom, but there are still only a fixed number of medical school slots, and many more people who want to be doctors. Had some of these discouraged people stayed in the game and applied, then the number of applicants would have gone up, while the number of slots remained the same. So the national average admission rate would have gone down. If some of these people at cutthroat places had gone to more nurturing places some may have made it to medical school, but they would have done so by displacing someone else- perhaps people at nurturing places, perhaps people at premed factories. Students should go to places where they think they will thrive, but it is hard to predict whether one place is better than another for medical school acceptance.</p>
<p>What it comes down to is what is the best alternative for YOU. If you are a student who needs to work hard, particularly in the maths and sciences to do well, who has not taken many AP science courses and do not test well, it may not be the best choice to go to the schools with a "cutthroat" reputation. On the other hand, if you have excelled in the top highschool, top curriculums with super test scores, had some taste of research, a top flight undergraduate premed program might be the challenge you would savor. It's not as though all schools are one or the other either. HPY and some other top schools do not have the reputation of being killer premed courses. Tech schools are notorious for ruining med students aspirations. </p>
<p>In our family, we have a doctor, one graduating from med school this year and one who will be applying next year. They have taken different paths in accordance to their profiles.</p>
<p>not to mention that if the harvard guy can spell you are toast.</p>
<p>Afan you asked a question whose answer is contained in your post.</p>
<p>You asked what evidence is there that MIT students get lower grades than Harvard students. But you said it yourself in the posts that you presented - 49% of MIT UPPER DIVISION course grades are A's, whereas only 22% of MIT lower division course grades are A's vs. 50% of ALL course grades at Harvard, both upper and lower division. So right there, is strong evidence that overall, MIT grades are lower than Harvard grades. Every undergrad, whether at Harvard or MIT, takes a mix of both lower and upper division classes, and in fact, the mix is usually about half lower-division, half-upper division. Hence, if you average it out, only 36% of all course grades at MIT (both upper and lower division) are A's, vs. 50% at Harvard. Question asked, question answered.</p>
<p>Not exactly. It was not "lower division", it was "first year". As I understand it, this means "second semester of first year", since the first semester is ungraded. So, to extend your analysis, it would be 22% A's for second semester of the first year, 49% A's for the remaining 6 semesters, 45% A's overall. But this does not tell us what the overall gpa's are, it tells us what (large) proportion of courses result in A's. </p>
<p>But wait, there is more!</p>
<p>"Freshman letter grades may not appear on students' official internal grade reports or external transcripts "</p>
<p>Therefore, the lower % of A's for freshmen is known within MIT, and used for this report, but these are not included in official transcripts, or for internal grade reports. This means that the lower freshmen "grades" do not affect reported GPA's of MIT students.</p>
<p>So the 49% A's reflect what is actually seen by medical schools.</p>
<p>I agree that few people are likely to apply to medical school on a whim. On the other hand, the engineers already have a marketable professional degree, so they do not have the "what do I do if I do not get into medical school" question that confronts most premeds with liberal arts degrees. This might give those non-engineers with fewer options more motivation to focus on their applications. Thus, a place that turns out lots of engineers might have lots of students who have less riding on their medical school applications.</p>
<p>No afan, once again, there is an error in your reasoning. </p>
<p>First of all, only the first semester's grades in freshman year at MIT are 'shielded'. The second semester's freshman grades are not hidden. Also keep in mind that this shielding is imperfect. Some medical schools, most notably Johns Hopkins, demand to see those first-semester grades, even though they are supposedly shielded.</p>
<p>"Please note, that grades for courses taken under pass/no record during freshman year are important to a few medical schools. Although not common among the majority of medical schools, Johns Hopkins University does request to see your freshman hidden grades. To release pass/no record grades contact each individual academic department and have your released grades sent to the MIT Careers Office (12-170). Your released freshman grades (not your official transcript) will be sent with your recommendation letter packet to the schools you apply to. Please submit the Hidden Grades Form to the Careers Office to indicate which grades you want to be sent to schools"</p>
<p><a href="http://web.mit.edu/career/www/preprof/medadmissions.html%5B/url%5D">http://web.mit.edu/career/www/preprof/medadmissions.html</a> </p>
<p>Secondly, your data says nothing about what happens in sophomore year, but it is generally true that most sophomore courses are not "upper division" courses. You usually don't hit upper division until year 3. Year 2 is not considered to be "upper division" except for unusually accelerated students.</p>
<p>True, there is no data about what the grades are in the second year, but I think it is safe to say that the A's given out during that year are less than 49%. </p>
<p>Hence, the point is, at the end of the day, it is clear that MIT gives out less A's than does Harvard, and hence, in that sense, that is strong evidence that Harvard tends to grade easier than does MIT. </p>
<p>Finally, I would argue that what you have said in your last post can swing both ways. You might say that engineers have less riding on their apps, if they choose to apply. On the other hand, you said it yourself, engineers probably feel less need to apply in the first place. Consider a decent, but not spectacular engineering student vs. a decent but not spectacular lib arts student. The engineering student may be able to get a decent job upon graduation and thus will feel less compunction to apply to med-school, relative to the lib art student whose job prospects are dicier and may hence feel the need to apply to med-school, praying to get in. Hence, I would expect there to be more 'desperate' lib-arts students trying to get into med-school than engineering students, or in other words, the engineering students who do apply will probably be, on average, better candidates than the lib-arts students, because the less strong engineering students feel less need to apply. Yet at the end of the day, 77% of all MIT premeds get into med-school vs. about 90% of premeds from Harvard and Yale (and few people at Harvard or Yale are engineers, whereas the bulk of MIT graduates are engineers).</p>
<p>"The second semester's freshman grades are not hidden." </p>
<p>You could be correct, but that is not what is says in "Rules and Regulations of the Faculty Revised to 9/02". Perhaps MIT does not follow its own rules, but it says </p>
<p>"2.60 Grades
2.63 Special Provisions for First-Year Undergraduate Students:
2.63.1 For first-year undergraduate students: (a) in the first semester and in the Independent Activities Period, the only passing grade permanently recorded by the Registrar shall be P; and (b) in the first semester, in the Independent Activities Period, and in the second semester, the non-passing grades of D, F, O, and OX shall be recorded by the Registrar foruse within the Institute only, and shall not appear on official Institute transcripts. </p>
<p>2.63.2 At the end of the fall term (and at the end of Independent Activities Period), letter grades equivalent to the letter grades assigned to upper-class students shall be provided to freshmen through their freshman advisors. Freshman letter grades may not appear on students' official internal grade reports or external transcripts and are to be used in accordance with guidelines established by the Committee on the Undergraduate Program."</p>
<p>You may be confusing this reporting of grades to freshmen and their advisors with providing them to medical schools as part of the transcripts.</p>
<p>MIT does provide these second semester grades only to schools that insist on seeing them, as you point out, a small minority.</p>
<p>So, as I indicated before, First semester- ungraded. Second semester - graded but the grades are not part of the transcript.
Therefore, the grades that the great majority of medical schools see are sophomore and later- described as 49% A's. For those schools that demand the freshman grades, only the second semester is available, since there are no first semester grades. Therefore 45% A's.</p>
<p>If MIT releases second semester grades to Hopkins, and a handful of other schools, then how could this have any impact on OVERALL admission rates?</p>
<p>"Secondly, your data says nothing about what happens in sophomore year,". </p>
<p>No. As used in this report, the term "upperclassmen" refers to everyone except freshmen. I'm sorry if my efforts to explain this did not make it clear. The report divides grades into TWO groups that include ALL MIT undergraduates: Group 1- first year students. Group 2- everyone else. So the grades for "upperclassmen" refers to sophomores, juniors, and seniors. It does NOT refer only to juniors and seniors.</p>
<p>Where was the error in reasoning?</p>
<p>"the engineering students who do apply will probably be, on average, better candidates than the lib-arts students, because the less strong engineering students feel less need to apply."</p>
<p>Huh? why would weaker engineering students feel less need to apply to medical school? Engineers across the board have better job prospects than the liberal arts students. So the reduced need to go to medical school would apply to all of them, not particularly to the weaker students. In fact, the weaker engineers would have the least appealing engineering prospects and might feel the most inclined to improve their fortunes by going into medicine.</p>
<p>Finally, imagine you are on the admissions committee of a medical school. You see applications from HYPSM. From HYPS you see all grades, from the start of freshman year. From M you see no first year grades (which is typical of medical schools). You know that first year grades tend to be lower. How would you compare HYPS grades to M grades? You could drop the freshman grades from the HYPS students and recompute their GPA's, to make the basis of comparison comparable to M. Since this would tend to raise their GPA's, you would them rank them higher. Or you could impute a lower GPA to the M students, based on the knowledge that, on average, their freshman GPA's are lower than their later GPA's. Either adjustment would result in higher reported GPA from M (since it excludes the freshman grades) than from HYPS. So, allowing for the practice of not giving (first semester) or not reporting (second semester) grades, admissions committees may be adjusting to compare M with HYPS. They would then accept HYPS students with lower REPORTED GPA's, whose total GPA's, including freshman grades, are comparable.</p>
<p>Look it is simple to understand. You can get a good education anywhere, you can go to some random school in Kentucky, or go to Harvard/Oxford and end up at the same place. The thing of it is that many people complain about the inflation in many of the schools, but they must be teaching the students well. Med schools are not dumb, they understand what is going on, and they will -not- accept students from University's that are known for having inflation and lack of knowledge. Yes, schools may have inflation, but Med schools know that besides the inflation, these kids have gotten an education that meets the standards of their med. requirements.</p>
<p>That is why many state schools may have those crazy weeder courses in which deflation is enormous. They have many people who do not have the qualifications of doctors, and this deflation is to basically get the better top half of the students. It's just a viscious cycle.</p>
<p>which ivy schools have grade inflation and which have grade deflation?</p>