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

Pre-Med & Medical School Pre-Med Topics
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<p>afan:</p>

<p>You fell into the same fallacy as BDM and his LSAT-gpa comparison. Cal-Berkeley has more 700 scorers in its upper quartile (25%, or 1200 Frosh) than Princeton in it’s entire class (~75% of total, or ~800 Frosh)! Forget the bottom quartile… quite frankly, this is the pool of prospective premeds. (btw: some/many of those sub-600 kids will flunk out of Cal quickly and will not return for Soph year; thus, reducing the F’s given out the following year!) </p>

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<p>Indeed!. Heck by the link you provided, there are few C’s. To be exact, “fewer than 5 percent fell below B-…”</p>

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<p>Dunno that its published externally. But, it’s common knowledge (check out the UC campus threads where kids post the mean and SD of Chem, Bio and Calc tests) that the premed STEM courses are typically curved to a C+/B-.</p>

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I agree that the average Princeton students deserve to go to med schools. Unfortunately, many comparable Berkeley students are not afforded that opportunity.</p>

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I’m confused. Are you arguing that premeds only come from high-SAT scorers? That every single premed at Berkeley’s MCB or organic chemistry classes has a Princeton-worthy SAT score?</p>

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I’m sure bluebayou isn’t talking in such extremes. But it does make sense that the smartest tend to be the ones who survive the early classes and comprise later premed classes + applicants.</p>

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<p>Sure, but the early classes are the weeder courses anyway. And in any case, why would we assume that Berkeley selects its kids exclusively from its Princeton-worthy SAT pool, while Princeton selects its kids from its mean distribution?</p>

<p>Sure, Berkeley has a talented “top tier” of kids. But so does every school. I think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the difference vanishes. A look at mean MCAT scores, if we can find it, will help demonstrate this.</p>

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<p>Everything Calparent said about Berkeley can easily be applied to any other school. Even if the poorer students in Berkeley’s science courses don’t become med school applicants, they still factor into the curves. I still see no evidence that suggests Berkeley is more difficult than Princeton.</p>

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<p>Of course not. But it stands to reason that those at the higher end of the SAT curve flunk out less and are able to more successfully run the premed gauntlet. In other words, they actually get around to applying to med, or in the case of your early regression, Law school (re: LSAT).</p>

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<p>Agreed (bcos I don’t think it is), but then I also don’t buy into bdm’s lsat-gpa regression, due to self-selection of the lsat. </p>

<p>My only question, and it was a question, is what the regression might look like with mcat+gpa stem scores? Cal, like most other colleges, awards A’s in over half of the humanities classes, so comparing gpa’s to LSAT is the same as comparing gpa to entering SAT (assuming that SAT and LSAT are related). But, Cal gives out a bunch of Cs (and lower) in the premed science courses, so gpa’s on average WILL be lower for folks in those courses. Of course, self-selection could occur in that a 3.0 from Cal just won’t appy to med school nor take the mcat but a 3.3 from Pton might. Thus, gpa’s might not be much different. Jes speculatin’.</p>

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<p>This is a great point, and it could tilt the interpretation, IF we had data on it. The only data I can find is for all courses, not broken down by STEM vs non STEM, or in any other way. Similarly, the grade distribution is for all students, not just those in a particular SAT range. </p>

<p>If you have data suggesting that essenatially all of the, rare, low grades are in the premed science courses, then that might change the interpretation. Even better if we had the grade distributions for those same courses at Princeton.</p>

<p>The best we can do with available data is compare grades as a whole to SAT as a whole. Doing that we do not find evidence of tougher grading. Might there be two Berkeleys? One attended by “Princeton-like” students that grades harshly, and another attended by people who would not get in Princeton with generous grading? Then one could hide the tough grading for the minority in rich grading for the majority. One would have to postulate that the premeds are forced to take the tough courses and their grades are lower. </p>

<p>Of course lots of people take intro biology, chemistry, and calculus. Not just a select few. </p>

<p>This two Berkeley hypothesis would also make it hard to reconcile with the suggestion that the less capabable students promptly flunk out. With so few failing grades, it must be pretty unusual for people to flunk out, since I assume that requires failing more than one course…</p>

<p>The self selection is likely to be even more problematic for med school than law school. There are lots of law schools of varying selectivity, and a student who wants to go to law school can do so, even with pretty low grades and LSAT’s. They will not get in Yale, but they will get in somewhere.</p>

<p>For med school, although there is a range of selectivity, even the least selective school is still pretty tough. So there are plenty of people whose grades tell them not to waste their time with the MCAT, or whose grades plus MCATs tell them not to bother with actually applying. If you limit the data, assuming we had it, to those who apply, you have a classic restriction of range problem. This hardly invalidates the results, but needs to be viewed carefully.</p>