<p>I heard that med schools favor the social sciences over the hard sciences slightly in admissions. And that your major doesn't factor THAT MUCH in med school admissions. </p>
<p>Apparently being an education major is the easiest major </p>
<p>Hypothetically speaking, since education is a social science, and med schools favor a high GPA (Education major average 3.8 according to this article), would it be smart for me to major in education, take pre med classes and maintaining a high GPA to get into great med schools? I don't want to end up majoring in something so difficult that it'll make me get a 3.4 GPA or lower as opposed to a top notch GPA.</p>
<p>I kinda want to major in education also, not for the easy gpa, moreso for something that would give me job security if i don’t make it into med school.</p>
Quite an eye opener for me to see such a disparity in grading between majors.</p>
<p>This reminds me of a textbook at the elementary/secondary school level,“Saxon math.” The author of this “old school” math series (sort of like “Kumon USA-style”) was a graduate from Westpoint (likely an EE major) and later became an educator because of his interest. He also wrote that many science classes taken by these education majors are watered-down version of the corresponding real science classes. (He took these classes in order to be certified as a teacher.)</p>
<p>OP, I suspect that being an Eduction major may not benefit you if your goal is to get into a med school. After all, the education major is a vocational oriented major. An applicant with such a major will have an additional burden of demonstrating to med schools that medicine, instead of teaching, is your calling. Also, if you know you could possibly get a higher GPA with the education major, med school adcoms will likely know as well.</p>
<p>Majors do not matter only to a certain extent. It may be better to look at this in this way: If you major in an academic major, and you are among the top 5 to 10 percents among the students with the same major as yours, the GPA will not become your liability in your med school application. In other words, the rank within your major matters more than your absolute GPA. At the end of the day, the class size of a med school may be only a fraction (5%?) of the freshmen year class size of a college (and there are fewer med schools than colleges.)</p>
<p>Causation =/= correlation. At my alma mater, a common phrase was that Music major applicants from my college had the highest admit rate to med schools. Did this mean that our music dept had some magic formula for getting people into med school? Abs not. Just that the self selected few, who happened to be music majors with a pre-med bent – were spectacular vs. the typical bio or chem majors who had a broader base of applicants. </p>
<p>Even if you decide to major in Educ, dont’ think that you can be anything but excellent in your science work. Or you won’t be going to med school afterward.</p>
<p>All professional schools prefer traditional liberal arts majors, and frown upon ‘vocational’ majors which includes education. Med schools in particular, want someone who is ‘all in’ and not planning for a backup.</p>
<p>If you choose a vocational major (which tend to have higher mean gpa’s), then your science gpa and mcat become much more important, relative to your consolidated gpa. </p>
<p>fwiw: Even tho Educ may have much higher curves, to me most of the material is about as exciting as watching paint dry. You couldn’t pay me to sit thru some Educ classes. Ed-Math and Ed-Stat is rather elementary (pun intended).</p>
<p>btw: I disagree with mcat that rank in major is even a consideration.</p>
<p>@Weeknd-- if you want to teach high school (as opposed to elementary or special education), you will need a major in your teaching field plus a minor in secondary education. (Your degree will say Secondary Ed, but your course distribution will more accurately reflect subject major + ed minor.)</p>
<p>There is a glut of bio teachers. If you want to use education as a back up, you’ll do much better as a math and/or physics major. There is a shortage of qualified teachers in math and the physical sciences (physics and chem). (Though the shortage is not necessarily in the schools you’d prefer to teach in. Even a math degree is no guarantee of a teaching position, esp in suburban school districts.)</p>
<p>Every state has unique requirements for certification. Having a teaching certificate in one state does not necessarily mean you’ll meet the requirements in a different state. You almost always will have to take additional coursework. (IOW, take your Ed certification classes in the state you intend to work in.)</p>
<p>Also it’s not necessary to get a BS in education to teach. Every state has an alternative teacher certification process for career changers. You can get emergency temporary credentials after as little as a summer of intensive coursework.</p>
<p>Private, non-public schools do not require a teacher certificate.</p>
<p>*A college degree is just about essential to make a lot of money in a career, but what if you don’t want to work all that hard to get a diploma?</p>
<p>Slackers wanting to earn the country’s easiest college major, should major in education.</p>
<p>It’s easy to get “A’s” if you’re an education major. Maybe that’s why one out of 10 college graduates major in education.</p>
<p>Research over the years has indicated that education majors, who enter college with the lowest average SAT scores, leave with the highest grades. Some of academic evidence documenting easy A’s for future teachers goes back more than 50 years!</p>
<p>The latest damning report on the ease of majoring in education comes from research at the University of Missouri, my alma mater. The study, conducted by economist Cory Koedel shows that education majors receive “substantially higher” grades than students in every other department.*</p>
<p>I think a Fellow at Stanford did similar research about 10 years ago when he published that the major with the lowest SAT scores on any campus, were the Education majors…particularly Elem-Ed.</p>
<p>If you major in an academic major, and you are among the top 5 to 10 percents among the students with the same major as yours, the GPA will not become your liability in your med school application</p>
<p>Ok…dumb question…do many/most college depts provide a ranking for their grads?? I can see that maybe the top elite schools might, but I don’t think the privates below Top 10-15 or the publics rank their grads…but I could be wrong.</p>
<p>Never heard of it. And the top elite schools would be highly unlikely to do any such thing since some departments may be so small as so only have a handful of grads every year. How meaningful is it to know that someone graduated #2 in a dept that had 3 grads that year?</p>
<p>I took that statement re top 5-10% among students in your major to mean “If you’re among the best in your major, then you probably have a fine GPA, and your GPA probably won’t be the limiting factor of your med school app.” As far as I know, schools don’t rank their graduates, but it’s pretty easy to know if you’re one of the better students, especially if you’re ranking toward the top of your classes in upper level classes. How can you know if you’re ranking near the top? In classes where profs curve, they often divulge the highest grade. If you’re near that, you’re near the top. Similarly, many profs will curve to a certain percentage of A grades–so if you’re getting As, you’re near the top.</p>
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I thought this was an interesting statement. I have no idea about the requirement of a certificate, but at my suburban private high school, all teachers were required to have a master’s in their subject area. 6 teachers had PhDs (5 were retired from previous jobs working in research or industry, and the other just wanted to teach high school). I had no idea this was atypical until undergrad!</p>
<p>If you love education, than it is smart thing to do. If you hate education, than it is not that smart to do. Remember, the most important is to enjoy your 4 years at college, if you do not enjoy it, it will also show as a negative during your interviews. No matter what you do, got to enjoy it, keep it in your mind for the rest of your life, nothing else works as a long term solution and 4 years out of your life is a very long time.</p>
If a student is in one of the smaller departments, I would think he may know whether he is among the pool of “better” premed stduents by his grades in most of the prereq classes. Most of these classes in freshman/sophomore years are sizable at most colleges.</p>
<p>Regarding the smaller top private vs large public schools: Somebody told me that if you go to a smaller top private school and choose to major in some large major (biology is large, chemistry or physics is smaller), you actually give up some benefit of going to such a school. This is because most of the classes in the first few years would be large and test-centric (i.e., the format is more like that in the science classes in a large competitive high school except that they may be more intense. But those from the large public high school do not have much to “adjust” when they major in such a test-centric major at a top private if they choose such a major.)</p>
<p>Sorry, but this line of reasoning doesn’t make any sense to me. It doesn’t much matter what a student “knows” about his/her standing…the only thing that matters is what the professional school adcom ‘knows’ or cares about.</p>
<p>A’s are A’s, regardless of whether in a large or small department. A’s in premed courses are A’s in premed courses, regardless of the size of the class, or college. </p>
<p>btw: a 3.7 from Brown, which is way below the top 5%-10% will still do quite well in the grad school admissions game.</p>
<p>At many schools, some students from most majors/departments may be graduated with Latin honors like Cum Laude, Magna Cum Laude, etc. There are some other non-EC related academic awards that are granted well before the graduation. If a student got one of these, (s)he may know (s)he is likely among the “better” students in the major (s)he is in. This is because only a fraction of the students within this major may get it.</p>
<p>Don’t get me started on the rumor that, at a certain school, about half of the graduating class are graduated with honors every year. If this is the case, you need to rely on some academic honors that are awarded to fewer students.</p>
<p>Actually, I believe in many majors (unless it is a very small major), after the second year, students would likely know who excel academically in their major.</p>
<p>But another point is that your GPA needs to be above some threshold which is considered to be good enough for med schools. After the grade (ditto for MCAT) is above this “good enough” threshold, I think a few points here and there may, generally speaking, not add much to your application (unless you shoot for a particular kind of school or program.) After the objective numbers are good enough, I think the med school will start to look at some other “quality” criteria (e.g., how committed you are to medicine, how much you love this med school, and what you can bring to the class, etc.) that is difficult to be quantified by just numbers.</p>
<p>My main point is that the statement “the major does not matter” is true only to a certain extent. You still need to be in a major with a certain level of academic rigor.</p>
<p>Just to beat a dead horse (bcos I have the time), I would submit that it still doesn’t matter. The ‘top’ Chem student (as determined by the silver chalice that was presented at graduation) is likely going to grad school, not necessarily professional school. But even so, a typical STEM course awards ~15% A’s. One does not need to be in the top 5% to earn an A. Even being in the second decile (11-15%) will still earn a 4.0.</p>
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<p>In the old days, ~80% of that certain college graduated with honors. :D</p>
<p>Of course, that is why such does not matter. At some colleges, Phi Beta Kappa is top 10%, at others its top 4%. Of course med adcoms know the difference.</p>
This is an interesting point. I always suspect that a student who is good enough to get into a med school (any one, not a selected few which are particularly picky) needs to be “pretty good” academically, but not necessarily the very best. If you agree at this, we are on the same page, I think.</p>
<p>In DS’s year, there was a student who really shine academically if we are talking about the stats only (something like 3.99, in a graduating class nobody had 4.0), but quite a few research med schools still did not take him, on the ground of “not a perfect match.” (A wildguess here: due to the fact that he did not have the kind or, more importantly, the depth of the research experience the research med school was looking for. He did get into H.)</p>
<p>"“rank within major” - does it mean that it is much harder to graduate Summa in some majors than others? It was very true in D’s UG. Pre-med “rich” majors had much much higher standard than many other majors. In D’s major Summa cut off was 3.96, she made it with 3.98, but many who expected to gradute Summa, got only Magna. That was pretty crazy, as other majors had much lower cut off. But it is totally irrelevant for Med. School admission IMO.</p>