<p>I am a recently admitted class of 2018 student at Wash U and would really appreciate it if you could answer a couple of questions that I had regarding premed.</p>
<p>paulkwon - What is the point of your post if you aren’t going to ask the questions?</p>
<p>I know this may vary for each person/class, but how many hours would you say on average a premed students spends each week studying (out of class) for each class? </p>
<p>Do many premed students participate in varsity sports, greek life, and other things that may not necessarily have to do with studying, and also perform well in classes (or are only a few student able to juggle premed work with other interests that do not include activities done to enhance their med-school application).</p>
<p>How competitive are classes - is there a preset cutoff or a curve in the gradings for exams (e.g. do the top 20% students get As or do all students that score over a particular score (e.g. 80%) get As)?</p>
<p>Approximately how many students fall out of premed?</p>
<p>Would you recommend me to take the physics 197/198 course if I do not have a very strong background in physics?</p>
<p>Amount of time studying outside of class is difficult to answer. Not all schoolwork outside of class is “studying.” A lot of it, probably even most of it, is spent on homework like problem sets, lab reports, etc. These can take up many hours throughout the week. For a typical first-semester freshman pre-med schedule, you might expect this work to take as much as 10 hours, maybe more, not including studying. That’s assuming several hours for the 4 weekly physics assignments, a few hours for a physics lab report, an hour or two for a math assignment, and an hour or two for a chemistry pre-lab report. Other courses like Writing 1 and other major-specific classes can add more hours. Including reviewing your notes and reading from the text, it could go up to around 20 hours of work a week, but that number can vary drastically. Some weeks you might have more work, some weeks you might have less. For some of my engineering classes, I’ve spent 10 hours writing a lab report on a single day. It all depends on many factors.</p>
<p>Everyone is different, but many students participate in activities outside of class and perform well. You’re encouraged to participate in as many activities as possible, which it hopefully at least one.</p>
<p>Classes aren’t too competitive. Students try their best and there really isn’t anything like sabotage. It’s a very cooperative environment at Wash U because everyone is dealing with the same difficult work. Grading for every class and professor is different. Some will have predetermined cutoffs like 90%+ = A, 80%+ = B, etc. Others will be curved and you will know the mean/median on exams but not know your grade until the end of the semester.</p>
<p>I don’t know how many students drop pre-med. Plenty do, plenty don’t.</p>
<p>Physics 197/198 is your typical intro-level calculus-based physics course. If you want to, you can delay taking it until you’re better at calculus, but you won’t really have a better background in physics by waiting. You’ll have some exposure to quantum mechanics and E&M from Chem 111A, but that’s only one part of the material from Physics 197/198. My advice to most people is it’s best to take physics freshman year when all of your floormates are taking it. 197/198 is better than 117/118, so you should opt for the former.</p>
<p>… damn</p>