<p>Can someone (preferably someone in college pre-med, or med school, like BDM) please explain to me the grading curve for pre-med classes.</p>
<p>I know that it is extremely competitive. I was always under the impression that only a certain amount of students recieved A's, a certanin amount recieved B's, and so on and so forth. For example:</p>
<p>10 kids in a class:</p>
<p>2 students w/ the highest grade on a test get the A's </p>
<p>2 students w/ the second highest grades on a test get the B's</p>
<p>2 students get C's</p>
<p>4 get D's?</p>
<p>could someone explain to me how this works.</p>
<p>ps: no sarcasm needed. however, feel free to exaggerate the competitiveness of pre-med classes inorder to get your point accross. Just don't be remiss in answering the original question. thanx :)</p>
<p>Varies within a school, much less between schools.</p>
<p>Grading depends on the school, the course, and the professor. No one here can tell you how your school does it, unless one of us has gone to your school and taken those classes.</p>
<p>It's generally a few A's, A LOT of B's, and a few C's and D's.</p>
<p>If a prof does use a standard bell curve, then the breakdowns are going to be more like:</p>
<p>Out of 100:</p>
<p>2 A's
2 F's
14 B's
14 D's
68 C's</p>
<p>Good wiki article on the matter: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_curve_grading%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_curve_grading</a></p>
<p>That's if you set the peak of the bell curve at a C. At most private schools, the median is curved to a B range (as was the case at Cornell), in which case the breakdown looks like this:</p>
<p>14 A's
68 B's
14 C's</p>
<p>and a couple of A+'s and D's.</p>
<p>It's almost impossible to get an F at the top schools, which is why the graduation rates at Harvard, Princeton, etc. are so high. Although one guy managed to score a 3% on one of the orgo midterms at Cornell. The midterm began with 6 multiple choice questions (he got 3 of them correct) and it went downhill from there. I bet that was good enough for a F.</p>
<p>what schools for pre-med have generally good grading scales?
I am looking at:
Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, UChicago, Caltech, UPenn</p>
<p>okay, so what about the "weed out classes"....those classes that are designed to "get rid of" the weak ( because of the competitiveness of medical school). How do those classes work?</p>
<p>=D, this thread makes me feel a bit better,...that because of me i could make someone else happy w/ an A, atleast i did something right in my class =D</p>
<p>wow this scares me....... It would be hard to keep your GPA up this way. So unless you get one of the 2 highest grades in the class your automatically a "B" and if you get one of the lowest "B" then your a "C".... why don't universities have grading scales like schools do?</p>
<p>As we've tried to emphasize -- over and over again, seriously -- this is but one example of a curve. Curves vary hugely from school to school to school and within schools from professor to professor to professor and even class to class to class.</p>
<p>A very "hard" curve at Duke was generally considered one where 25% of students were each given A's, B's, C's, and D's.</p>
<p>bcmp classes r curved at b-...my first experience =/ gg...realistic goals lol...pakbabydoll, but the curve doesn;t really hurt u, in that without the curve, everyone would be getting Ds...so can;t blame the instructors, we're just too dumb LOL...</p>
<p>Pakbabydoll, if universities used the traditional grading scale for science courses, we'd all fail. I got an A- in first semester orgo without breaking 80% on any of the tests because everyone else was only averaging 60%.</p>
<p>norcalguy is our idol and hope =D along w/ bdm and brm</p>
<p>^they do give great advice. but anywho...</p>
<p>any more experienced people have anything to say about pre-med and med school grading curves. particularly about "weed out classes".</p>
<p>I don't think i've experienced any "weed-out" classes thus far...Otherwise i just see them as normal classes at this point. Generally about half of the students in my intro bio and chem classes recieved C's (or lower) based on the statistics the profs have given us. I doubt recieving one C truly weeds a premed out, but it certainly hurts.</p>
<p>None of my profs have implemented anything like a traditional curve. They generally pick a point (85% for example) as the A cutoff, and so on so forth, and try to make tests that give the class a C average.</p>
<p>I remember the first thing my gen chem professor said to the class, "Everyone, i will curve this class. 90% and above will be curved to an A, 80-90 is curved to a B, 70-80 is curved to a C, good luck." ah good times.</p>
<p>I know a bunch of (ex)-premeds from last year that decided against premed after receiving a C or two in intro bio and intro chem.</p>