Going to med.school from Cornell

<p>What are average GPA of Cornell students who get admission to med.schools?
I think there's a rumor that med.schools like Cornell students. Is this true?</p>

<p><a href="http://www.career.cornell.edu/HealthCareers/acceptedApplied.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.career.cornell.edu/HealthCareers/acceptedApplied.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>There's your data. No, medical school don't especially like Cornell students. 80% acceptance rate two years ago, 77% overall acceptance rate last year. 86% acceptance rate last year among applicants with 3.4 or above GPAs.</p>

<p>"If you are comparing Cornell's acceptance rates to other colleges, keep in mind that Cornell does not prevent any student from applying and includes in the Cornell data all those who applied."</p>

<p>Thanks for the info. Then, what universities do medical schools prefer in "picking" students?</p>

<p>What I mean is that Cornell applicants will get the same amount of respect afforded to other students from top institutions and maybe a little bonus on the GPA part due to its grade deflation. However, from your original post, you seemed to single out Cornell as the preeminent premed institution which it is not.</p>

<p>cornell gives out EXTREMELY low marks, and low GPAs don't get you in to med school</p>

<p>don't med schools know that cornell gives bad grades though?</p>

<p>Yes. </p>

<p>And no Cornell does not give out extremely low marks. A good portion of its classes have medians curved to B+'s or A-'s. It's grading is certainly not unfair. A little hardwork and a little initiative goes a long way. Cornell's acceptance rate to med school among its applicants with 3.8 or above GPA's is 98.9% in the last two years. So if you can get a 3.8 GPA, you have a super good chance of getting into med school.</p>

<p>So..do you all know any schools that have some grade inflation?(Exclude Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Stanford - I know they have)
And universities in which medical schools generally prefer? What about Univ. Michigan(Where I might transfer to)?</p>

<p>You should ignore answers that claim to tell you which colleges "have grade inflation" and are therefore better places to attend for premed. This misses the point so completely as to be dishonest.</p>

<p>First, top colleges, essentially all of them, have overall undergraduate GPA's between B+ and A-. This is true at the places "famous" for grade inflation and at places "famous" for low grades. When people make these claims, ask to see the data. Until they show you that, this is speculation, not fact. You can see the data for many colleges at gradeinflation.com. The numbers are for different years for different colleges, but the trend of increasing grades over time is present for nearly all of them. To correct for the trend over time, you have to apply the increase rate to each college and extrapolate to 2005. When you do this, you find "B+ to A-" everywhere.</p>

<p>Second, the small variation in gpa's within this range may have nothing to do with "grade inflation". You must control not only for the academic preparation of the students, which varies even at top colleges, but also for the course selection. Science gpa's tend to be lower than those in humanities and social sciences. Again, this is true across the board. So a college with a large proportion of science majors would tend to have an overall gpa closer to the B+ side of "B+ to A-", while a college with relatively few science majors would have a gpa closer to the A- side of the range. If you are headed to med school, you want to know "what is the gpa of premeds"? But no one can tell you, since people move into and out of the premed group as their plans and interests change. Alternatively, you could ask "what is the gpa of biology majors" considering them to be representative of premeds. Two problems with this. 1. The schools will not tell you the answer to this question and 2. People change majors. So students who entered as premeds and signed up as bio majors may switch out of bio when they decide not to apply to medical school. The GPA of people who STAY in the major will be higher than the GPA of all people who considered entering the major. So the bio gpa figure you got, if you could get it, which you can't, would be hopelessly confounded by survivorship bias. </p>

<p>Third, with the recent hoopla about "grade inflation" some colleges have resolved to lower their mean gpa's. These efforts have been variably successful, and even the faculty at these schools are not sure how the experiment will turn out. So you could pick a college based on its grade inflation, only to find it embarking on a process of lowering grades once you arrive. Think about someone who went to Harvard expecting a near certainty of graduating with honors, now discovering that this is no longer the case.</p>

<p>Fourth, you don't care what the gpa of you classmates may be. You care what YOUR gpa would be. This depends far more on how you interact with the teaching style and environment of the college, than it does on the nearly meaningless aggregate figures.</p>

<p>Fifth, painful as it may be to acknowledge, college performance is closely linked to family income. Although everyone knows people from wealthy families who are lousy students, and everyone knows people from poor families who are great scholars, IN AGGREGATE, the higher the income of the family, the higher the high school grades, SAT's, college grades, and MCAT scores of the students. The average family income of medical students is far higher than the average income of families throughout the country. This is sad but true. So a college that enrolls a relatively large proportion of upper middle class kids (any top private college) will, by that fact alone, have enrolled a group more likely to get into medical school. As should be obvous from the above, it is completely meaningless to compare the overall gpa's at top state school, like Michigan, to top private schools. In spite of its high academic standards, Michigan enrolls lots of kids who would never get in Harvard, Columbia, Princeton or Stanford. At Michigan, a quarter of the class score below 570 on their SAT 1 verbal, a quarter were under 600 in math. Scores of 670 V, 710 M would put someone in the top quartile at Michigan, while it would be difficult, not impossible, but difficult, to get in to the top privates with scores like these. At Berkeley, arguably the best state school in the country, the scores are slightly higher, but nowhere close to those of the top privates.</p>

<p>So the GPA's at these top state schools include those from a large group of students who would either 1. never be at the top privates in the first place or 2. would be in serious academic peril if they did attend. If these students try to take the same courses as the better prepared students who were at the top of the class at admission to college, they will get very poor grades. This tells you nothing about the grades received by the students who entered the state school with top credentials.</p>

<p>Sixth, related to the income point, many of the nation's top high school students go to their local state school because they cannot afford the privates. So a top student, whom Harvard would love to admit, can afford to go to Harvard if the parents can pay full freight, or if they are poor enough to qualify for full financial aid (as noted above, there are not many poor kids with Harvard-level academic credentials). Middle class families often find that the "generous financial aid" of the top privates is, for them, a cruel joke. They require such huge family contributions that the students cannot afford to consider attending these schools. So they go to their state school. Many of these kids also work during the term, some of them many hours each week. This detracts from their study and extracurricular time, which impacts their medical school applications. Students whose families pay full freight at Harvard, do not have to worry about this.</p>

<p>Finally, what you really, really want to know is "For a given student, with high school academic accomplishments that would get her/him into the top private colleges, a given level of time and energy available to devote to studying, and a given level of motivation to go to medical school, what would their GPA be at each of these schools?" Anyone who claims to have an answer to this question either has no idea what they are talking about, or is lying to you.</p>