<p>I know this may have been answered in other threads, but ill be attending the U of Chicago next fall and i'm scared that the grade deflation there may kill my chances at med school. Do med schools take individual grading systems into account? thanks much</p>
<p>At most elite colleges, U of C included, the mean gpa is between a B+ and an A-. This is within the range at which medical school applications are realistic. Students who get into these top colleges usually do very well on standardized tests, and, as a group, get high MCAT scores. </p>
<p>BDM showed that there was a substantial range of gpa vs LSAT scores among top colleges, and this might influence the plans for students considering LAW SCHOOL. However, I note that, excluding the technical colleges, most of these "deflated" schools at the top of the list send huge numbers of students to top law schools. Medical schools tend to be less formulaic than law schools in their admissions criteria. </p>
<p>Now you MIGHT have to work harder at U of C than other places to get your grades- almost impossible to get a reliable answer to this question. But your gpa is likely to be more or less the same there as at its peer colleges. </p>
<p>From most top colleges (say the top 40 or so on mean SAT) an average or slightly better than average gpa plus strong MCATs = good chance of getting into medical school.</p>
<p>what would be an avg to slightly better avg GPA? </p>
<p>and would this be the same for state schools?</p>
<p>The important features of the link I posted is mostly to answer the actual question you're asking.</p>
<p>1.) No, GPAs from different schools are NOT considered to be equal.
2.) However, this is not a grade inflation or deflation adjustment.
3.) It is also not a prestige adjustment.</p>
<p>Other points from the thread:
1.) Conventional wisdom about grade inflation -- that Harvard, for example, is very inflated and that state schools are deflated -- are wrong.
2.) It does not make sense to select (or avoid) a school based on their grading schemes.</p>
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what would be an avg to slightly better avg GPA?
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<p>Well, average is B+ to A-, so slightly better would be "high" B+, or better.</p>
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and would this be the same for state schools?
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<p>I don't really know. I do not believe that med schools selectively favor elite privates over state schools in admissions. However, I don't know the mean gpa's at the state schools, or the mean MCATs. Since the entering SAT scores are almost always lower, on average, than at the elite privates, the hypothetical pre-weeding average MCATs would tend to be lower, but once weeds out most premeds I don't know what the actual MCATs look like.</p>
<p>Why one should interpret the gpa vs lsat data with caution in the premed context: </p>
<p>The LSAT is a timed test of a particular kind of reasoning. It is not a test of learned knowledge, and it strongly favors people who are good at solving certain types of verbal problems in logical thinking. It is heavily g-loaded. It is NOT a general assessment of how well educated people are. Most people who go to any of these colleges do not take the LSAT. Therefore the sample of prelaw students is not likely to be representative of the student body as a whole. </p>
<p>Relatively low GPA in spite of a high LSAT may mean that the kind of reasoning that results in a high LSAT is not that helpful for a student at that college. For example, in math and science courses the challenges are rarely in deciphering the language to guess meaning of the question. Rather the hard part is in understanding the concepts. For this reason, except for g, the characteristics that lead to success in these courses do not have much to do with those that matter for getting a high LSAT score. This is likely the reason that people from MIT, all of whom took challenging advanced courses in math and science that are hardly typical prelaw fare, get low gpa's for their LSAT scores. The talents that lead to the high LSATs were simply not that useful in their coursework.</p>
<p>People from places like Caltech or MIT who take the LSAT are by that factor alone atypical of the students at those colleges, so one should use caution in interpreting the findings in such a selected sample. </p>
<p>For people who attend more broadly-based colleges the LSAT might be more closely related to the sort of thinking that is rewarded at their institutions, or it might not. This will depend on the courses they actually take, and on the approach to education. For example, there is data showing that the LSAT is a good predictor of grades awarded for timed in-class tests, but not of untimed take home tests or papers. So, for students who take the same nominal courses at two different colleges, the one who was evaluated largely on in-class timed tests might show a higher correlation of gpa with LSAT than the student who was largely evaluated on take home tests and papers. </p>
<p>On the other hand, the parts of the MCAT that matter are largely tests of what you learned in your courses. The writing sample is not, but it is both useless for predicting medical school performance and widely ignored in med school admissions. There is little point in taking the MCAT if you have not taken biology, chemistry, and physics. A really smart person without these courses will do better than a less talented person, but neither will get a decent score if they don't know anything about the science.</p>
<p>The MCAT is an excellent predictor of medical school grades, the LSAT is an even better predictor of law school grades. Students in med school and in law school are using different talents to do different things.</p>
<p>So showing that some colleges have systematically higher LSATs for the same gpa than do other colleges tells you something about course selection, evaluation and grading practices, but it is not a general assessment of relative grading levels at the different institutions. </p>
<p>A much closer pass would come from looking at GRE test scores (in specific areas, not the general score) vs gpa in intro and mid level courses in those areas. At that point one really would be asking the grade inflation question "For a given level of mastery of this particular subject, which college awards higher grades?"</p>
<p>Overall I think the above post makes some good points about how one should take the LSAT/GPA comparison data when comparing it to med schools, but there are a few issues:</p>
<p>I would strongly disagree that the MCAT is more a content test than it is a reasoning test in the same vein as the LSAT. It of course requires a broader knowledge base to do well, but in the end every section of the test can be considered verbal reasoning, in many cases all of the information required to answer the questions for a given passage is provided to you and minimal previous knowledge is needed.</p>
<p>The assumption that MIT pre-law students are taking a much more science-oriented curriculum than others is one I find highly suspect. MIT is actually a very broad-based school anymore, and a fair number of students at schools you describe as more broadly-focused are likely to be science majors anyway.</p>
<p>I personally think the LSAT/GPA measurement is actually a pretty good method of assessing grade inflation at most schools. Students who take the LSAT come from the entire spectrum of programs at a given university, which provides at least a reasonable if not ideal sampling of grading across different departments. I would also argue that as one gets in to more upper-level science and math classes, the reasoning skills tested on both the MCAT and LSAT are crucial for mastering the concepts. I know numerous prelaw student who have taken advanced math courses to work on their logical reasoning before taking the LSAT.</p>
<p>Except for engineers, MOST prelaw students nationally do not take courses equivalent to the MIT GIRs. I'm not sure how to get data to prove this, but inspection of the liberal arts major requirements at colleges around the country will confirm it. If you are more persuaded by anecdote, ask some lawyers you know how much multivariable calculus they took in college.</p>
<p>The following may be more pedantic than most readers care about. I obsess about such things, so suffer with me.</p>
<p>Since we have digressed this far into LSAT properties, a couple of references to introduce those interested to its characteristics</p>
<p>ED469175 - Predictive Validity of the LSAT: A National Summary of the 1995-1996 Correlation Studies. LSAT Technical Report. LSAC Research Report Series.</p>
<p>This includes the low correlation between undergrad GPA and LSAT score. In short, knowing someone's LSAT score does not tell you much about what their undergrad GPA is likely to have been. Everyone knows counterexamples, but this was a study of applicants to and matriculants at 165 law schools, many thousands of students. Some may find this surprising, but, again, the LSAT tests one thing. This is useful in law school, but it does not begin to capture all there is to high performance in college.</p>
<p>Speed as a Variable on the LSAT and Law School Exams (RR-03-03)
William D. Henderson, Indiana University School of Law—Bloomington</p>
<p>Discusses the extent to which speed is a factor in LSAT performance, and its differential predictive value for speeded vs unspeeded tests. Also delves into the variable predictive power of UGPA, depending on what was being graded.</p>
<p>BDM's study of the grade levels associated with given LSAT scores is exactly what one would expect if for the courses typically taken by students who apply to law school, different colleges systematically emphasize certain types of assignments and evaluations to a different degree. Specifically, timed in-class tests with a heavy verbal reasoning component tend to test the same skills as the LSAT. Untimed take home assignments and those with a limited verbal reasoning component will not have nearly as high a correlation, if any at all.</p>
<p>BDM's work might be very useful to prospective prelaw students in analyzing the possible relationship between their talents, the LSATs, and the educational approaches of colleges they are considering. The systematic differences he shows imply that the colleges really do provide different educational experiences. Of course, such students should also seek information on where students from each college are admitted, and the gpa's and LSATs that are associated with admission to each law school.</p>
<p>For premeds, it is much more informative to look at the mean gpa of applicants to mean MCAT of applicants from each college they are considering. First of all, they are planning to apply to med school, not law school, and to take the MCAT, not the LSAT. Second, a college with relatively high MCATs, but relatively low gpa may actually have more stringent grading in the courses that premed students take. However, the same colleges with high MCAT to gpa ratios tend to be extremely selective for undergrad admissions, and have high success rates for medical school application. Such a college might look "grade deflated" by the MCAT/gpa criterion, but if 90% of the applicants are admitted, then one might not want to view this "deflation" as a disadvantage.</p>