Does your undergrad really matter if you plan on going to a top med school

<p>You all know a lot more about the numbers than me, but I’ll insert a personal, N=1 data point. My D1 transferred from Michigan to Y as a soph and while happy with the change, still bemoans the fact that getting a high gpa in her premed coursework would have been so much easier had she stayed at M. To be completely honest, she didn’t take premed classes her first semester at M, so she only had diff eqs and first semester of OC+lab there. I have no idea what the grade distribution is between these two schools is, but her comment is that she was towards the top of her cohort at M, but more in the middle of the pack at Y, and so has to work much harder to get top grades. If grade inflation exists, she’s not feeling it, particularly in those classes where grades are curved.</p>

<p>“Publish” isn’t quite the word I’d have used, but in any case the data is here. You can see on the one hand that sakky’s core point about inflation is right: MIT is brutal compared to Ivies like Harvard and Princeton.</p>

<p>On the other hand, the data also says that state schools like Berkeley are, as a general rule, even easier. Consistent with entomom’s story. Sakky’s begun speaking of state schools as being highly stochastic, which … well, I don’t really understand what he’s trying to say.</p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/3365648-post29.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/3365648-post29.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>(To me, “stochastic” usually means randomly distributed around a core trendline. Not sure what sakky means here.)</p>

<p>EDIT: Whoops, the list actually indicates that Michigan is pretty deflated, too. Interesting.</p>

<p>There are 2 U of Michigan on that link, one has -0.966136 and the other (marked Ann Arbor) is -0.206136??</p>

<p>Yeah, the original data I based it off of had multiple years but didn’t specify which was which. It was interesting to me that it varied that much.</p>

<p>Hmm, I see lots of varied answers reading this stuff. I guess what I want to know is…what defines a good undergrad from a “mediocre” one? I do plan on attending med school someday except my family isn’t exactly loaded with the green goods right now so I’m pretty much staying in Maryland. Would anyone say the University of Maryland (md’s flagship university at college park) or UMBC (my safety school) is a bad undergrad? I don’t plan on going to Harvard for undergrad or anything but I don’t plan on going to community college either. What separates good from bad?</p>

<p>A little off topic but on the same subject, I knew going into college I wasn’t going pre-med, and I told most of my friends they would probably drop the program (your freshman year everyone is pre-med pretty much), after the first semester everyone dropped it. Biology for majors (with lab) and chemistry for majors (with lab) are BRUTAL, I saw straight A students in high school have to drop the class because they had a 60 average in the class. Its tough, these classes are meant to separate those who REALLY want to work for it from those who just wanna do it because its good $$$. </p>

<p>That being said, I love being a hospitality major :D</p>

<p>Why become a doctor only for the cash… I see plenty of businessmen making bank.</p>

<p>Just for fun after reading this thread and checked out DD’s medical school to which she received acceptance in the fall.</p>

<p>It is listed in the top 10 in almost every sub category they offer
She went to Berkeley (bio major)
She had a lowly 29</p>

<p>How does that factor in?</p>

<p>The only thing I see that is strong is that obviously Berkeley has a national reputation so the same GPA there may receive subconscious bonus points as compared to a lesser know school like Chico State or Sacto State.</p>

<p>And, at a huge public institution it is very difficult to forge the relationships that will garner stellar LORs. D3 is at a small private and had better instructor magic helpful relationships at the end of her first term then her sister did as a senior at Cal. But, if the student does get great LORs, then adcoms probably realise not only is it a strong letter, it is a strong letter from a place that does not foster student-prof relationships, speaking to the abilities of the applicant to connect.</p>

<p>I do think a well-known and well-reputed school will give you some bonus points, even if it merely a subconscious boost on the part of the adcom. I do think you can get into med school from an unknown school, but you’d better be nearly perfect in numbers and </p>

<p>But really, Norcal was right. It is silly for HS students to be going through the mental mechanations of trying to determine the best college choice for med school apps. So many people who enter calling themselves pre-med end up changing majors. </p>

<p>Applying for med school successfully is the culmination of a solid MCAT, strong(3.5+) overall GPA, and self-investigation into medicine via shadowing and volunteering and also being involved in social ECs, research plus doing what it takes to obtain stellar LORs.</p>

<p>That is a huge 4 years of hard work package; kinda hard to fake it. Hard to stumble through, you must be a diligent and involved student, so pick the school where YOU will succeed and hopefully have no loans at the end of it all.</p>

<p>HS students quit fixating on prestige and fixate on putting yourself in the environment that will work for you, there is no #1 right answer.</p>

<p>Mike:</p>

<p>was the data in #62 a comparison of LSAT-gpa or MCAT-gpa by school?</p>

<p>LSAT. MCAT would have been more interesting – what I really want is SAT, obviously – but that was the data I had available at the moment.</p>

<p>If I recall correctly, the BDM data was mean LSAT vs mean GPA of law school applicants from each college, as pulled from a self reported web site. Is that right? This served to generate a regression of gpa, in completely non standardized curricula that would vary from one college to another, vs performance on the LSAT, which is not a test of what one learned in college. It might indicate that students at the most selective colleges have higher LSAT’s than their grades would predict, but this does not tell us how equivalent work would have been graded at different colleges. The LSAT does not test what they would have done in college, so one cannot use it to norm one college to another.</p>

<p>The problem is that the LSAT tests only certain abilities, which are not universally needed for academic success, although they seem to predict academic success in law school. But it is a poor proxy for overall academic accomplishment.</p>

<p>One could include the mean SAT for these same colleges to attempt to adjust for academic ability of the student body overall. That is, if grading standards were uniform, one would expect the colleges with higher mean SAT’s to have higher mean GPA’s. The SAT is in many ways a test of overall intelligence, with bonus points for coming from a well educated upper middle class background. Both contribute to better college performance. Evidence of “easy” grading would be higher mean GPA than predicted based on SAT.</p>

<p>In comparing across colleges, one would also have to address the question of systematic differences in GPA by broad field (say engineering vs humanities). There is some data that engineering has lower grades overall than humanities, and that this is observed at many colleges. Thus a college with a high proportion of engineering majors may have a lower mean GPA than a college with few or no engineers. This could occur even if every engineering project were graded the same at both colleges, and for that matter if every humanities paper were graded the same way as well.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Right. </p>

<p>Either you know what would happen, or you don’t. Since it is untestable, you don’t know. So, as you so well illustrated, any such claims are fiction. </p>

<p>The fact that no one has data does not make all fiction valid. It just means there is no data.</p>

<p>The reason I asked is that the grade inflation-deflation issue is much more pronounced in the sciences. In the humanities, A’s and B’s are much more readily obtainable in the humanities, even at schools like Berkeley which give out a bunch of D’s and F’s in the premed sciences. Thus, I would guess that the grade range would not be as wide as it might be if we had science gpa’s and MCAT scores. But just a guess…</p>

<p>“2) I think, even with grade inflation, Top 20 colleges are still harder than state schools. There is limited data available. But my conjecture comes from a couple of things:”</p>

<p>^ Thank-you, someone who agrees with me</p>

<p>“The reason I asked is that the grade inflation-deflation issue is much more pronounced in the sciences. In the humanities, A’s and B’s are much more readily obtainable in the humanities, even at schools like Berkeley which give out a bunch of D’s and F’s in the premed sciences. Thus, I would guess that the grade range would not be as wide as it might be if we had science gpa’s and MCAT scores. But just a guess…”</p>

<p>^ This is true, as long as you do the work for your humanities classes(it can be a lot), you should get an A. For some of the pre-med classes at Vandy, no matter how much me and my friends study, there are certain tests and assignments where we all just get dominated. You guys thought I studied a lot, some of my friends here work twice as hard, and still don’t get the results they wanted.</p>

<p>Would anyone say the University of Maryland (md’s flagship university at college park) or UMBC (my safety school) is a bad undergrad?</p>

<p>No. They are not “bad undergrads”. You can get where you want to go from either. Will it be as “wow” as some other places? No. Make up for it in other ways.</p>

<p>It is LSAT vs. GPA data, but it’s from a mostly-not-self-reported website.</p>

<p>The LSAC compiles average GPA and LSAT data from each school, and reports that number to each candidate. That candidate thus knows the total number, and he then goes and punches it into a database. In other words, it’s not a point-by-point regression; we know the mean for each school definitively.</p>

<p>But it does not include premedical populations; in fact, it doesn’t include anybody who didn’t apply to law school. So I think it would, indeed, be best to make the adjustment based on SAT scores.</p>

<p>My personal favorite model would be to use incoming SAT scores and compare outgoing GPA-in-premed-requirements. But we don’t seem to have that data available to us.</p>

<p>BDM,
Some people are simply not good with SAT. It includes kids who have never had a “B” in their life. I know one - my D. In her case, it is her slow reading, which actually is very helpful (specifically in science classes), since her reading comprehension is very high. Reading score has always been her lowest by far on all standardized tests (starting in elementary school) with English (writing) being highest, which is also very helpful in college. There is some correlation between tests and GPA, but in some cases it seems not to be very strong.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>That would be ideal. However, there are data that speak to the “grade deflation” question.</p>

<p>I have cited it previously, search “afan” and the following topics:</p>

<p>Berkeley grade distribution. UC Berkeley has published its grade distribution. It shows that the vast majority of grades assigned are A’s and B’s. There are very few F’s.</p>

<p>[Undergraduate</a> Education Colloquium, The College of Letters and Science, UC Berkeley](<a href=“http://ls.berkeley.edu/undergrad/colloquia/04-11.html]Undergraduate”>http://ls.berkeley.edu/undergrad/colloquia/04-11.html)
“Of 79,791 undergraduate course grades given at UC Berkeley fall 2003, almost 50% were A’s, approximately 35% were B’s, and less than 5% were D’s or F’s.”</p>

<p>Princeton grade distribution. Princeton has published its grade distribution. It shows that the vast majority of grades assigned are A’s and B’s. There are very few F’s.
[Felten</a> analysis refutes grade inflation claims - The Daily Princetonian](<a href=“http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2004/04/23/10392/]Felten”>http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2004/04/23/10392/)
[Princeton</a> University - grading_proposals](<a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/~odoc/grading_proposals/index.html]Princeton”>http://www.princeton.edu/~odoc/grading_proposals/index.html)</p>

<p>The UCB and Princeton grade distributions are strikingly similar.</p>

<p>UCB and Princeton publish their SAT scores for their students. The SAT scores are strikingly different. </p>

<p>Berkeley
Critical Reading Middle 50%: 580 - 710
Math Middle 50%: 630 - 760
Writing Middle 50%: 600 - 720</p>

<p>Princeton
Critical Reading Middle 50%: 690 - 790
Math Middle 50%: 700 - 790
Writing Middle 50%: 690 - 780</p>

<p>Look carefully at these scores. It takes a 590 CR to get down to the bottom quartile at UCB. Meanwhile one hits the top quartile at 701. But bottom quatile at Princeton starts at 690, which is close to the top quartile from UCB. This differences are nearly as striking for the writing test, what ever it tells us.</p>

<p>Math is not as extreme, but there is still a large proportion of students at UCB who would be in the bottom quartile, and for many far far down in the bottom quartile, at Princeton.</p>

<p>SAT correlates highly with academic performance. </p>

<p>So we have two colleges, one with a much higher academic ability student body than the other. They have similar grade distributions.</p>

<p>Where is the evidence of grade inflation at Princeton or deflation at UCB? This looks to me more like harder grading at Princeton than at UCB.</p>

<p>^ That’s exactly why I think the whole hard/easy thing lies in the curves, simply because you’re compared against your own student body. It follows simple reason that you would have to work considerably harder to get an A in a curved class at Princeton than at a lesser school, simply because the quality of work considered average at Princeton will be higher (by how much, I do not know) than what would be considered average at a lesser university.</p>

<p>That’s my personal issue with using GPA as such a strong component of the application (not that it matters). An A at one school may be equivalent to a B at another, yet med schools will toss out your app for having that lower set of grades, even if the amount you learned and the work you did was equivalent or greater than that of the kid who got the A at an easier school.</p>

<p>@afan your deduction is valid for the overall student population. Cal overall student gpa is around 3.2-3.3 and princeton’s is probably a bit but not much higher. There is obviously no comparison in term of the average student academic ability between the two schools. In fact, Cal takes in 1500 CC transfers each year, most of whom have lower stats than the freshmen.</p>

<p>But in the context of premed, I would disagree with your deduction. </p>

<p>First, Grade inflation at Cal, as in most other colleges, is primarily casued by overly lenient grading in non-STEM courses. Majortiy of the premeds at Cal major in biological sciences such as MCB/IB/HB. Grading in these majors is by no means inflated. MCB average gpa is around 2.8. And of course, they have to go through the infamous BCMP weeders. </p>

<p>Second, while Cal admits many academically marginal students under the guise of holistic evaluation, it does admit plenty of academcially capable students. Many of these students have academic profiles comparable to those of Princeton freshmen. Keep in mind that Cal enrolls 4 to 5 times more students than Princeton. Most of the better students gravitate towards premed, engineering, and business.</p>

<p>I am well aware that there is a range of admissions standards at Berkeley, and that engineering, in particular, is extremely competitive. So it may well be that the figures for the engineering students admissions profiles would look different from the university as a whole. Also possible that the grade distributions would be different, and that the relationship between SAT and GPA would differ. Unfortunately, we come back to data. If anyone has this data for the engineering, or other schools, it would be great to see. Until we have it, we are back to speculation.</p>

<p>At a place like Princeton, the assumption is that essentially anyone who gets in can do well enough to go to medical school, or equally competitive graduate or professional school if science is not their thing. The mean GPA of Princeton grads who go to med school is about the same as the overall mean. So “average Princeton student”=“successful med school applicant”.</p>

<p>The only data I could find on GPAs for Berkeley did not break down by major or even STEM vs other. It is certainly possible that the culture tells people that only top students attempt the STEM fields, and that Berkeley STEM graduates look much like Princeton STEM grads. Of course, many premeds do not major in science, and take most of their courses outside of STEM. Again, if anyone know of data on this, it would be great to see.</p>

<p>Princeton has engineering students too, and they probably have a higher academic profile than even the lofty mean of Princeton students overall. So we would need to compare Berkeley engineers to Princeton engineers. Great if we could do that. Do you know of a data source?</p>

<p>Meanwhile to the question of whether medical schools adjust their interpretation of GPAs based on the undergraduate college.</p>

<p>There is data that suggests that perhaps they should, a little. In a broad review of the predictive ability of MCAT, undergraduate GPA, and selectivity of undergraduate institution, the authors found that uGPA alone was a good predictor of medical school grades and USMLE scores. By taking into account the selectivity of the undergraduate college (mean SAT), they improved the prediction by a small but significant amount. This implies that, at a national level, an equivalent GPA from a more selective vs less selective college implies a stronger student. At this point it would suggest that the med school should give a few points for getting equal GPAs from a more selective vs a less selective college. </p>

<p>On the other hand, they found that the MCAT was a substantially better predictor than uGPA, and that with the MCAT score in the model the selectivity no longer contributed to prediction. So whatever effect the selectivity of the undergraduate institution may have, it is fully reflected in MCAT scores.</p>

<p>Note: this means that medical school need not consider the selectivity of the undergraduate college in predicting medical school grades. However it does not tell us whether medical schools actually consider undergraduate college when making decisions.</p>

<p>[Validity</a> of the Medical College Admission Test for Predictin… : Academic Medicine](<a href=“Academic Medicine”>Academic Medicine)</p>