<p>How bad is the grade deflation at Cal? If I'm a pre-med, should I attend Cal if accepted? Or am I better off attending UCSD, USC, or UC Irvine?</p>
<p>[National</a> Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com%5DNational”>http://www.gradeinflation.com) has average grades at each school (links at the bottom).</p>
<p>Generally, more selective schools have higher average grades (but also more competitive students). This appears to be generally true within the UC system (which tends to have higher average grades than CSUs and California community colleges).</p>
<p>There are some exceptions, such as Eastern Oregon, Western Michigan, Western Washington, Wisconsin Green Bay, Wisconsin LaCrosse that are less selective but show relatively high average grades.</p>
<p>However, schools like Brown, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Amherst, and Swarthmore have the highest average grades.</p>
<p>I personally have always held that the far more interesting question is regarding intra-university grade deflation: why do STEM courses tend to be graded far more harshly than are humanities courses within the same university? </p>
<p>Hence, the more relevant answer to the OP’s question is where can he obtain higher grades in the pre-med requirements.</p>
<p>I suspect that STEM courses are graded more harshly because undergraduates in those fields are more likely to go into professions directly applying those skills, and the students themselves are stereotyped as being of a higher quality. It probably also helps that professional STEM work involves solving very difficult problems and seeing a VERY high rate of failure, and getting people used to that is an important part of getting them ready for the work itself.</p>
<p>If you want to go pre-med, I personally don’t think Cal is a good choice, and that USC would be a much less stressful alternative (which I think is a VERY important consideration for pre-med work).</p>
<p>So basically what the 2 posters above said is exactly true, so the easier grades, for pre meds, can probably be found elsewhere. The one thing I will say however, is that due to, what I percieve as cut-throat competition in these godforsaken pre med courses for the top 15% A’s (read: A’s, not A minuses, since over here an A - is a 3.7 and an A+ is a 4.0, double standards much?), I’ve learnt a lot more than I think I would have with an easy A from “other” colleges. Hopefully this helps me down the road in mcat (which is what the chem1a professor said: we make this courses so that you can suceed down the road on the mcat etc). So if you are a masochist who likes living in fear of whether you’ll make the cutoffs, come on down. I mean, it does make the end of the semester more of a suprise…</p>
<p>FWIW, we know of a student who went against his dad’s wishes and attended Cal because it was his dream school. He’s now in a private school (after having finished his Bachelors at Cal) in Boston trying to bring his grades up for med school.</p>
<p>Hmm. I know of someone who is doing the exact same thing. Masters in Education at Harvard much?</p>
<p>If you’re dead set on attending medical school in the future, I would steer clear of Cal. </p>
<p>Yes, Cal does have lots of resources and does send bright students to med schools, but I would say that 90% of the students whose GPA range falls below the typical medical school requirements (3.0-3.5) would do much better at a lower-tier or private school.</p>
<p>These lower-tier/private schools typically have either a) a higher median GPA b) a less competitive student body, or c) a combination of the the two, which will make getting into medical school a lot easier at another university.</p>
<p>UCSD or UC Irvine are good alternatives that don’t have as stiff competition. Or if you have the money to afford a private school, USC might be your best bet since private schools usually take good care of their undergraduates.</p>
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<p>But couldn’t the counterargument be made that, if the STEM students are indeed stereotyped of being higher quality, then the grading should be higher than it is? Put another way, why should the students in the creampuff majors receive high grades just because they can meet low standards - which exist because those students are stereotyped as being less capable? </p>
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<p>Well, I don’t know about that. It seems to me that professional humanities work is likewise very difficult and involves an extremely high rate of failure - arguably even higher than that of STEM. Let’s face it - only a miniscule percentage of people who try will ever become great authors, poets, artists, or film-makers. </p>
<p>Heck in most instances of the humanities, it’s unclear what the definition of greatness even is, at least at any given point in time. Impressionist artists were initially widely ridiculed, and their first exhibition was deemed the ‘Salon des Refuses’ (Exhibition of Rejects) at which the public came mostly to mock them. As ridiculous as it may seem now,The Empire Strikes Back received notoriously mixed reviews from film critics upon initial release. Emily Dickinson was widely dismissed until decades after her death, mostly because of her work’s untraditional poetic styling (when nowadays her work is considered to be great precisely because of the untraditional styling). In contrast, if anybody can design a microprocessor that can do everything that today’s processors can do (same instruction set, same socket size, same power consumption, same production costs, etc.) but can compute at a far faster rate, then there would be no dispute that that would be hailed as a great engineering feat. Obviously achieving such a great feat is monumentally difficult, but at least everybody can agree on what the parameters of greatness are. On the other hand, you can’t just go film a ‘better’ version of The Empire Strikes Back and be considered a great filmmaker.</p>
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<p>According to [National</a> Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com%5DNational”>http://www.gradeinflation.com) , the difference is 0.2 to 0.3 of a grade point on average. Whether this is “far” more harshly is a matter of opinion.</p>
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<p>That certainly seems like a lot to me: I would have happily pocketed an extra 0.2-0.3 extra of GPA. I’m sure that every STEM student here would say the same. </p>
<p>Besides, look at it this way. If it’s not an important difference anyway, then schools should have no problem in ‘refunding’ those GPA points back to all of the STEM students and graduates, right? </p>
<p>And besides, like I had already said before, the key problem with the gradeinflation analysis is that it provides precisely zero accounting for missing-grade attrition. Many students who initially start in STEM and perform poorly will switch to an easier major. If they had stayed in STEM, they would have continued to receive poor grades, but since they left, the poor grades that they would have earned are missing because they are never recorded. In contrast, far fewer students in humanities and social sciences leave those majors because of poor grades, and those that do tend to drop out of college entirely rather than choose STEM. {I can’t think of many people who initially wanted to major in humanities but it was too hard and they were getting terrible grades, so then they switched to engineering/CS instead - but I can think of plenty of the reverse.} </p>
<p>But even ignoring that missing data, you still have a 0.2-0.3 GPA difference, which only serves to underscore the issue.</p>