Don't care about rigor of major?

[sakky]

<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.

</p>

<p>Actually, it is. The numbers speak for themselves. </p>

<p>

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

</p>

<p>We’re not comparing MIT to Duke, Dartmouth, or Rice: after all, MIT students are supposed to be more qualified than students from those schools. The average student at those schools probably couldn’t get into MIT. </p>

<p>I have been comparing MIT to Princeton, and I agree that the GPA’s are comparable. </p>

<p>

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>Actually, I don’t think this matters much at all. See below. </p>

<p>

No.

</p>

<p>Yes. Notice that I said savvy premeds. There are obviously plenty of non-savvy premeds who foolishly take the regular intro courses that have the tough grade curves (and get crushed). </p>

<p>However, from what I have seen, it is the savvy ones who use freshman year to make hay while the sun shines, for example, by taking courses on subjects that they already know from high school. For example, I know many students who could have AP’d out of intro chemistry, calculus, etc. but chose not to, determining that it would be better for them to stock their GPA arsenal, or take intro language courses in languages that they already speak fluently. {Heck, I’ve been advocating that engineering students do precisely this to survive the upcoming weeder war, which tends to occur in sophomore year for the engineers.}</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.

</p>

<p>Let’s keep in mind what I am talking about here. I am simply using MIT as an example of a famous school that should be known for its engineering rigor. If some premed were to major in engineering at some 4th tier no-name school, med-school adcoms might well question how rigorous his program is, no matter that he’s an engineer. But the MIT brand name is far too prominent to dismiss as unrigorous as far as engineering is concerned. But dismiss it the adcoms do.. Put another way, med-school adcoms don’t care about the difficulty of your major, even if that difficulty is well-understood.</p>

<p>Now, if you want to argue that MIT biology is not that hard, then I don’t have any serious objection to that notion for I tend to agree. However, my point is - and to which you agree - that med-school adcoms don’t care about the difficulty of major, even if the level of difficulty is well-known.</p>