Don't care about rigor of major?

[norcalguy]

<p>

Again, the issue is about relative grade inflation, which means that the real issue is whether MIT students suffer from grade deflation relative to peer schools. MIT students are obviously some of the most technically competent students in the world, so one would expect them to earn high grades simply by that fact alone.</p>

<p>Harvard</p>

<p>Yale University</p>

<p>MIT

</p>

<p>Without knowing what MIT’s average GPA is today, it is still not apparent whether MIT is more or less grade inflated than Yale and Harvard. After all, 10 years ago, it’s average GPA was 3.26. From grade inflation.com: Duke’s GPA was 3.33 in 1999, Dartmouth 3.31, Rice 3.31 (2001), Princeton 3.34 (this was pre-grade deflation initiative), and so on. The average GPA at these supposedly grade inflated schools were not that much different from MIT’s average GPA. Factor in the fact MIT has a much higher proportion of engineers, I’m not sure if there is any difference in GPA at all for non-engineers. A better comparison would be to compare the average MIT GPA to the engineering schools at Columbia or Cornell or whatever and you would see the difference shrink even more.</p>

<p>

Yeah, but what about that freshman MIT year? That is precisely the time when savvy premeds at other schools could be racking up strings of easy A’s.

</p>

<p>No.</p>

<p>Freshman year GPA’s tend to be lowest at every school (meaning, longitudinally, a student’s GPA tends to rise as they progress through their college career). For example, the average GPA for freshmen at Cornell is approx. 3.0 (info given out at orientation) while the average GPA overall for all students is in the 3.4 range. This is not so surprising considering the curves for intro courses tend to be lower and the freshmen are adjusting to the rigors of college academics. I don’t know if med schools ask to uncover the P/F grades MIT gives out to its students their freshman semester but if they don’t, then that is actually a significant advantage for MIT premeds to be able to hide their freshman grades.</p>

<p>I agree with the notion that engineering is not a great premed major and that the rigor of engineering makes it more difficult to have time to assemble a great med school application. MIT, one would expect, would have a higher proportion of premed engineers. However, it is not apparent to me that a humanities or bio major at MIT would be worse off than a humanities or bio major at Duke or Dartmouth or any other top college.</p>