<p>I committed to UChicago and will be matriculating this fall with plans to major in econ or statistics. I understand that, unlike high school, classes are graded on a curve and not an absolute scale. This means that getting A's is much harder. If I were to apply go law school med school, business school, etc. in the future, how much would a GPA from schools like UChicago, Columbia or Upenn be given a boost? Is there any hard evidence to support this? </p>
<p>Sorry bradybest, have no answers for you, but I’d be curious as well. My daughter is finishing her second year at UChicago and has started to consider grad school. She has a solid - but not outstanding GPA. Enjoy your time at Chicago, it sure does fly!</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s any hard evidence to really support a hardcore answer. Although places like Chicago and Columbia are harder, they sometimes also have grade inflation - for example, in my department at a school in that league, the curve is calibrated so 35% of students get an A. I think there’s maybe a slight boost but nothing that can be expressed in numerical terms - it’s not, like, “going to Chicago is worth an extra 0.2 in your GPA” but more like admissions folks take it into account when holistically evaluating your application.</p>
<p>Also, as of now, I’m interested in eventually getting into investment banking or private equity. Does being a Chicago grad give me a boost if I want to apply to the Chicago Booth Business School? </p>
<p>There is so much misinformation on CC and on this one I have to say something. :-)</p>
<p>People talked about top school grade inflation relatively often. But I feel it is only reasonable that all these top schools give out 60% A’s. 
(I hope it will change to this way when my kid is in college) The so called ‘grade inflation’ among these highest caliber of students are not inflation at all, these students are almost all valedictorian or salutations of their high schools… you know they could get 4.0 without much difficulty in their flagships if they chose to attend. I believe the grad/professional school admissions know about the competition and GPA ranges better than I do.</p>
<p>It seems there is a general misconception that students of all level of colleges need high GPA’s to get into med school/law school/grad school. This made many students (CCers) who were admitted to top schools worried about their GPA’s before they even started college. I hope future admits are not afraid of being a small fish in a big pond, because you will have more similar caliber peers to collaborate with.</p>
<p>I don’t have a proof for graduate school admissions but I do have for med schools. This is the evidence that if you attend a top 20 university, the professional school administrations you apply to know the competition in your college is high and you don’t necessarily need a 3.5 GPA to get in med schools (graduate school?). Check page 21:
<a href=“https://prehealth.wustl.edu/Documents/Handbook.pdf”>https://prehealth.wustl.edu/Documents/Handbook.pdf</a></p>
<p>I cherish these top school kids very much because I know many of them, and they talked about how they don’t feel they are the top of the world anymore once they are in their universities, but they are not afraid and they stretch themselves to be the best they can be. I am glad they didn’t stay in their flagships just to get good GPA’s. </p>
<p>OP, I congratulate you for being accepted by U of Chicago and committed to it. Go for it!</p>
<p>UChicago is an incredibly rigorous school and does not have grade inflation like a lot of the Ivies. I have good friends who go there. If you do well there, you will be very competitive for the top PhD programs, I saw a lot of students from there are various open houses in my field.</p>
<p>There are just a lot more factors going into your business school admissions. This is grad school admissions forum, there is a separate forum for MBA. But coming from a top school will always be a huge plus for any tippy top business school. I don’t know if being from the undergrad particularly helps or hurts. Go ask in the business forum.</p>
<p>In my short time of research on CC, I found top school STEM fields are all tough. Princeton has famous grade deflation, and Cornell is tough, even Yale STEM isn’t like it’s humanities that give out 60% A’s… Chicago Statistics isn’t going to be easy either, but I think post-graduate schools know about this.</p>
<p>Poor STEM kids all over the top schools, but they have strong spirits and should be commented for that.
<a href=“Cornell parents: Did your "superachiever" fail their first test? - Cornell University - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/cornell-university/1562337-cornell-parents-did-your-superachiever-fail-their-first-test.html</a></p>
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<p>Attending an Ivy League right now, I have to wholeheartedly disagree with this.</p>
<p>First of all, the purpose of grades within a specific university is to compare you to the other students at your own university. If 60% of people within one class gets an A, then an A becomes absolutely meaningless.</p>
<p>Second of all, there’s no evidence that Ivy League students would be easily able to get a 4.0 “without much difficulty” at their state flagships. Many state flagships are rigorous places that have excellent educations and professors that could’ve worked at prestigious schools, too (UVa, UCLA, UC-Berkeley, Penn State, Michigan, UNC-Chapel Hill, UT-Austin, Ohio State). Besides, as I’ve said before in other places, environment has a big impact on a person’s grades. A competitive atmosphere that is primarily focused on academics may be good for the average Columbia student, but if they went to a more mixed environment with all kinds of students (including those primarily there to party), they may not have fared so well. I’m pretty sure that my GPA would’ve been better, not worse, if I had attended Columbia for undergrad. The students here spend most of their time studying and the focus is nearly always on academics, and there’s that peer pressure to do really well. Whereas at my undergrad, the emphasis was more on balancing work and play, so I wasn’t really motivated to always get As.</p>
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<p>Nobody said that you needed to have a 3.5 GPA to get into med school or grad school. But this isn’t “proof.” This is the handbook of ONE selective university and a slice of the admissions stats (science GPAs and MCAT scores). However, you don’t have any evidence that a public flagship doesn’t have the same outcome/comparative statistics. Moreover, we don’t know anything about the rest of the students’ profiles. Even then, the handbook kind of proves the point.</p>
<p>The AMCAS does release a similar grid of applicants and acceptance rates by overall GPA and MCAT scores (<a href=“https://www.aamc.org/download/321508/data/2013factstable24.pdf”>https://www.aamc.org/download/321508/data/2013factstable24.pdf</a>) and it does appear that at lower GPAs and MCAT scores, Wash U students have overall higher acceptance rates than the general population. But that could be because of better pre-medical advising at the school, more opportunities to do med research, better overall profiles, etc. It also doesn’t rule out the possibility that this trend also occurs at good public flagship universities as well.</p>
<p>I have worked with students from top school as well as students from more middling schools, and the students from top schools aren’t any more hard-working or spirited than students from other places. In fact, they’re not all that different in personality. They’ve often had more resources and opportunities, which has led them to accomplish more in high school. I’m not taking anything away from their accomplishments, but they’re not necessarily objectively better or smarter than students at public flagships.</p>
<p>I just wanted to clarify that it’s not that I don’t believe that the boosting phenomenon happens. I just don’t think that it’s as large or universal as people assume. Like I said in my original comment here:</p>
<p>*I don’t think there’s any hard evidence to really support a hardcore answer…I think there’s maybe a slight boost but nothing that can be expressed in numerical terms - it’s not, like, “going to Chicago is worth an extra 0.2 in your GPA” but more like admissions folks take it into account when holistically evaluating your application. *</p>
<p>In response to the OP, I attended a top 10 school for undergrad (graduated about a week ago, so this info is current) and have heard different desirable GPAs for different programs. My friend was in an engineering program, and for the Master’s, it was recommended that she have at least 3.3/4. For a PhD in my social science department, my advisor informed me that any GPA of at least 3.0/4 would be fine, and that a lower GPA would mean your application would have to really stand out in other areas. But the GPA, above or below 3.0, would hardly be the largest portion of your application. A friend in a different engineering PhD program at my school, who had completed his earlier education in a different country, said he had heard the same when preparing to apply - keep a decent GPA and focus on your research.</p>
<p>Honestly, after thinking about it, I think if you were to get any “boost” in admissions, it would be based on the rigor of your coursework. For example, if you were a science major at Chicago, and you had maybe ~3.5, they might conclude you are as qualified as a humanities major with a higher GPA because of the rigor of the major. </p>
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<p>Almost none, particularly for LS. (A major ranking factor of law schools is GPA, so a high GPA from regional Podunk college beats a middlin’ GPA from Chicago every time, at least for law schools.)</p>
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<p>In addition to Juillet’s comments, med GPA is also state specific. A 3.5 will just not cut it for an unhooked California resident. OTOH, it maybe just fine for those residents of some midwestern states where many of WashU’s students hail from.</p>
<p>They’re very different, BTW. B-schools tends to care more about your work experience and potential (virtually no one goes to b-school straight out of undergrad). Law schools and med schools seem more numbers driven.</p>
<p>“Attending an Ivy League right now, I have to wholeheartedly disagree with this.”</p>
<p>Attending an Ivy League may not give you the credential to speak for all. As I checked credential you posted, you are a student in Sociomedical Science Ph.D. program and the requirement for applying to the program in your school is to concentrate in “anthropology, history, psychology or sociology”. So it looks like you were not of STEM background and not into STEM studies even though the name of the field sounded like one. </p>
<p>And you are a graduate student; the average semester GPA requirement for a graduate student is B or higher; professors usually wouldn’t give low grades for graduate classes. Humanities are much easier in getting high GPA’s (this has been a common understanding) and you probably would not feel the PAIN the STEM kids I know have gone through. Example on CC (I read on CC and know STEM in top schools like Stanford, MIT, Cornell, Princeton, Caltech, even Yale are like this in general; although to a different degree)</p>
<p><a href=“Cornell parents: Did your "superachiever" fail their first test? - Cornell University - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/cornell-university/1562337-cornell-parents-did-your-superachiever-fail-their-first-test.html</a></p>
<p>(A poster in that link said “I had a 2.5 after two years including one semester that was a 2.1. I ended up going to graduate school at Stanford and MIT.” Although that was a long time ago.
Another said ““2300 plus SAT, perfect GPA, 800 Math Level 2 SAT and now failing test scores in CoE.” – Standard in CoE (Cornell University College of Engineering) )</p>
<p>“First of all, the purpose of grades within a specific university is to compare you to the other students at your own university. If 60% of people within one class gets an A, then an A becomes absolutely meaningless.”</p>
<p>Let’s look at why graduate students basically get all B’s and above – because of their qualifications; they proved themselves to be able to handle post graduate work by their undergraduate records so there is very little need to ‘weed out’. There are not many low quality graduate students even though there are still some who exaggerate when they applied. Top school undergrads may have better qualities than even state school graduate students. I can’t prove that with evidences but it is my observation looking at graduate students in my current state flagship and my friends’ high school kids who go to/graduated from top school STEM fields.</p>
<p>I still hope :-), by the time my daughter goes to college, top schools give out 60% A’s. (including STEM areas)</p>
<p>“Second of all, there’s no evidence that Ivy League students would be easily able to get a 4.0 “without much difficulty” at their state flagships.”</p>
<p>That is a fact while kids of my university town who were high school top students but were not admitted to top schools almost all get 3.9-4.0 GPA’s in their flagship honors program.</p>
<p>“Nobody said that you needed to have a 3.5 GPA to get into med school or grad school.”</p>
<p>May not be you, but I remember clearly one said GPA 3.8 is average for med school admissions (no matter it is from a top school or not. And she continues to argue that is the case while I am not the only one to tell her otherwise, with facts to back it up). I had to refute this kind of mis-information in order to make new admits not to be afraid of attending top schools they were admitted. (this may hurt my dauther’s chance in the future, in case she is wait-listed , but I feel obligated to say it for the benefit of some new admits who worried so much about their future GPA’s.)</p>
<p>I never said that my PhD was in a STEM field, or referenced it at all. The OP wasn’t even asking about STEM degrees - he said economics or statistics. I was talking about the undergraduate students at my university, who I teach. My disagreement was with the idea that these are universally the highest caliber students and that Ivy League students deserved to have their grades inflated. (But, for future reference, I am also not in the humanities, and one of my concentrations in my PhD is statistics and methodology - so I have taken several higher-level statistics classes.)</p>
<p>* and you probably would not feel the PAIN the STEM kids I know have gone through*</p>
<p>…I’m getting a PhD. I just finished writing a dissertation.</p>
<p>I personally would also argue that (having taken both) the humanities are not objectively easier than the sciences, but I’ll leave that for another day.</p>
<p>* That is a fact while kids of my university town who were high school top students but were not admitted to top schools almost all get 3.9-4.0 GPA’s in their flagship honors program.*</p>
<p>This is 1) anecdotal evidence that 2) has nothing to do with performance in an Ivy League program. Some people rise to the challenge. Besides that, admissions are at all-time lows. These schools have less than 10% admissions rates - some are close to 5%. They themselves admit that they have to turn away thousands of qualified applicants every year. That means that there are some applicants who could’ve done just as well at Harvard who are going to Penn State or Michigan State or Kenyon or wherever.</p>
<p>Besides, even if this is true, it doesn’t negate the original statement I made - which was basically “don’t assume that others assume it’s more difficult to get a higher GPA at a more prestigious school” (and its corollary, “don’t assume that you will get a higher GPA at your local flagship than a prestigious private institution”). There are LOTS of other factors that play into GPA besides just the rigor of coursework.</p>
<p>May not be you, but I remember clearly one said GPA 3.8 is average for med school admissions</p>
<p>The overall average for medical school admissions is a 3.69 (see it [here](<a href=“https://www.aamc.org/download/321494/data/2013factstable17.pdf]here[/url]”>https://www.aamc.org/download/321494/data/2013factstable17.pdf)</a>), which isn’t very far from a 3.8. The AMCAS doesn’t release school-by-school information, so the schools track their own data. It would be a difficult job to aggregate it.</p>
<p>There may be some evidence that students from more prestigious schools get a small bump in GPA, but I think it’s safe to say that the higher your GPA is, the better; and that students with a 3.8+ have a much better chance of getting admitted than a student with a 3.2+ regardless of what school they go to (and the AMCAS and Wash U charts both bear that out). Personally I don’t have an issue with telling med school (or grad school in general) hopefuls from any kind of school to aim for a 3.5+ if possible.</p>
<p>Also interesting is [url=<a href=“https://www.aamc.org/download/321496/data/2013factstable18.pdf]this[/url”>https://www.aamc.org/download/321496/data/2013factstable18.pdf]this[/url</a>] table from AMCAS, from which it doesn’t seem that there is a “boost” based on major. The average total GPA of STEM majors who matriculate in med school (so are admitted) is pretty much the same (about a 3.7) as the average for social science and humanities majors. To me, that either means that med schools don’t think that STEM majors are objectively harder, or they simply don’t care.</p>
<p>“My disagreement was with the idea that these are universally the highest caliber students and that Ivy League students deserved to have their grades inflated.”</p>
<p>What make you think they are not the highest caliber students? (except we all know URM atheltes and those with other hooks) For the non-highest-caliber students, isn’t 40% of BCDF grades enough? My point of bringing up you are not in STEM is that you didn’t know the PAIN of the STEM field students I know; that’s why you didn’t think they deserved to have better grades (I still wouldn’t say that would be inflated grades. It is not.) Did you read the link that the parent of high caliber students were worrying?</p>
<p>"“That is a fact while kids of my university town who were high school top students but were not admitted to top schools almost all get 3.9-4.0 GPA’s in their flagship honors program.”</p>
<p>This is 1) anecdotal evidence that 2) has nothing to do with performance in an Ivy League program."</p>
<p>On 2) If those who didn’t get admitted to top schools can get 3.9-4.0 GPA in state flagships, the valedictorines and salutations can do the same or better. On 1) You can say it is anecdotal evidence but that is only because there is no research on it. But this is not a secret. Those who were admitted to Ivy League programs but decided to go to their state flagships did well GPA-wise also, almost everyone of them. No doubt about it.</p>
<p>“3.69 (see it here), which isn’t very far from a 3.8”</p>
<p>3.69 is far away from 3.8 if it is used AS AN AVERAGE. </p>
<p>"…I’m getting a PhD. I just finished writing a dissertation."</p>
<p>Congratulations! I hope if you get into academia your students won’t need to worry about their GPA’s if they are high caliber and work hard.</p>
<p>“Besides that, admissions are at all-time lows. These schools have less than 10% admissions rates - some are close to 5%. They themselves admit that they have to turn away thousands of qualified applicants every year. That means that there are some applicants who could’ve done just as well at Harvard who are going to Penn State or Michigan State or Kenyon or wherever.”</p>
<p>You proved my point. These are doing well in state schools getting high GPA’s and the same/higher caliber ones in the top schools are suffereing their grades… I think you get it now.</p>
<p>Also “I just finished writing a dissertation.”</p>
<p>Don’t know ‘finished’ meant you finished writing but your advisor hasn’t given feedbacks yet or all are done. If it truly is ‘finished’ with your advisor’s blessing, you’ll have to prepare well for your final defense - the committee members could be tough sometimes. If you can read their papers before going into your final defense room it may help you to answer their questions better since it’s easier for you to understand where they are coming from. </p>
<p>I imagine this would be an extremely intense time for you - wrapping up dissertation, preparing for defense, looking for a job… not easy that you still spent time trying to help people on CC. Good spirit!</p>
<p>Well, that escalated quickly…</p>
<p>The alternative reason for not giving 60% "A"s at Ivy leagues: those kids still deserve to have a challenge, too. I would be disappointed to go to a top school and then not get challenged by the academics at all. 60% of the class being able to get an A isn’t a sufficiently challenging environment. I learn more in the classes I have to work harder for and still don’t get the best grade.</p>
<p>Also, as a STEM major, the line “you didn’t know the PAIN of the STEM field students I know” makes me role my eyes at least a little bit.</p>