<p>Are there courses where they actually curve to bell curve standard deviations (meaning a predetermined number of students receive each letter grade)? I know in Bio 25L, the curve was simply points added to everyone’s final grade to bring the average grade up to a B-. If the average grade was already at least a B-, no grades would be lowered.</p>
<p>All of this is making me slightly worried. My question is what type of GPA do you need to be successful coming out of Duke? Does it make a difference if you want to apply to med schools or go into business? I am a freshman and most other freshman believe that they need a 3.7+ gpa in order to be successful.</p>
<p>What is a realistic target GPA? Is being an average student at Duke good enough? Will a Duke student not get into med school if they have only the average GPA (I think it’s around 3.4). Does it get harder to earn grades on a curve as the weaker students get weeded in classes like 152L? What type of students get weeded out of premed or econ classes?
I’m asking this because it is very difficult to beat the curve in intro classes which means that only a select few get As. I just want to know the facts so that I can have realistic expectations and goals.</p>
<p>Duke is notoriously hard. We have the general trend of sending grads with high MCATS and low GPAs to great med schools. A 3.4 from Duke will definitely not keep you out of med school since med schools know that we work really hard. That’s why when you look at stats of med schools and see the 3.7/3.8, you have to keep in mind that those are many state school students or students from high grade inflation (harvard comes to mind). </p>
<p>Keep in mind though that the school doesn’t “make you.”. Yeah, being at duke with the resources definitely helps, but just being a duke student won’t make you successful. But yeah, on the same token, many average duke students are still “successful.”</p>
<p>A 3.4 at Duke won’t definitively keep you out of med school, but if you are applying to top med schools your chances are significantly reduced. That’s because some schools will pre-screen apps and those are done almost always or in large part by numbers and done by people who will probably not be the one to make the final decision on your app unless you are pre-screened out. </p>
<p>Thus, it won’t matter that you come from Duke or that the BME program is #2 in the nation and it’s really hard. If you don’t have the numbers, you will likely not make it at those schools unless you have an extremely good hook. </p>
<p>A few schools that are known to screen pre-secondary: UCSF, UCSD, most UCs, Vanderbilt, VCU, Wake Forest, Mayo, UWash, East Virginia, U Indiana, Iowa, UNC, Loyola Chicago, OHSU, Alabama, Illinois, Louisville, Tennessee, Toledo, Wayne State, West Virginia</p>
<p>Of course, some schools prescreen based on residency instead, classic example is UWash, if you are not from washington, wyoming, idaho, and montana or something like that you are almost automatically rejected.</p>
<p>SBR’s right. Pre-med advisers at Duke repeat the conception that medical school admissions understand and account for the fact that average GPA’s overall at Duke are lower than at state schools, but I don’t think they consider the differences enough for our GPA “disadvantage” to be fully countered.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, getting into a top-10 medical school takes a lot more than grades. If you can get the other parts covered, your grades will probably be fine (by correlation). Don’t get me wrong; Duke is hard, and probably much harder than anything you experienced in high school. Still, if you work hard, a 3.7+ isn’t exceptionally elusive. It might seem so at first, though, after all the weed-out courses, but your GPA should start climbing back up after the first two or three semesters (or so I’ve heard…I’m still only a freshman, but I have a few friends who are upperclassmen).</p>
<p>However, this might only apply to Trinity. I have no experience at all (neither direct nor indirect) with Pratt, so it might be different there.</p>