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<p>Do you mean that there is less [grade</a> inflation](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com%5Dgrade”>http://www.gradeinflation.com) than at many other universities?</p>
<p>Unfortunately, as long as medical schools do not account for grade inflation when considering GPAs of applicants, universities have plenty of incentive to have grade inflation.</p>
<p>Assuming that the data from gradeinflation.com become generally acknowledged, some admissions departments at some schools will then create GPA normalizing programs.</p>
<p>Let’s suppose the aggregate ave. GPA of schools with a top 25 ranking is 3.45. Let’s further suppose Cal’s is 3.3</p>
<p>The normalizing matrix would look like this:</p>
<p>College X (Cal): add 0.15 + correction factor listed below:
Engineering: add 0.15
Math/Science: add 0.1
Social Sciences: add 0.0
Arts & Humanities: subract 0.2</p>
<p>Assuming College X is Cal Berkeley, the overall correction factor would be 0.2, then the Division adjustments would be some variation of that shown.</p>
<p>Whether such correcting matrices will ever be used, who knows? I suspect they’re used informally and sloppily when evaluating applicants from schools like Swarthmore, Princeton, perhaps Haverford, perhaps Wake Forest, perhaps Cornell in the past, but not for Cal, but that is purely opinion.</p>
<p>Similarly, for Stanford or Brown the full-school normalizing factor would be -0.15. For Harvard would be -0.1. For Princeton woud be +0.1, etc.</p>
<p>Unfortunately even though it is commonly known that Cal grades very tough compared to say, Stanford, the med schools really do not account for this very well. I say this as a former med school admissions member. People really have a hard time looking past the Stanford name (or Harvard or wherever) even though there is a massive amount of evidence of grade inflation there.</p>
<p>Unless you are very interested in the sciences I would strongly consider an alternate major such as history, english, art or whatever else you are interested in. The admissions stats for non-traditional majors are actually much better than for science majors. I actually was an econ major at Cal (an utterly useless degree IMHO- economics is a fraud posing as science).</p>
<p>I would not do business as a major for pre-med. Most professional schools look down on “careerist” majors such as business. This is probably not fair, but that is the way it is. A business major is not seen as very academic and rather low brow. Ironically even most grad schools of business, at least the high caliber ones, look down on undergrad business majors.</p>
<p>Still, there is the argument that more selective schools “should” have grade inflation, since the “quality” of students is better. Note that within the UCs, the less selective ones tend to have lower average grades.</p>
<p>However, it should be theoretically possible for a medical school to review the past performance of medical students in medical school and compare with their undergraduate GPAs at various undergraduate schools, and assign adjustment factors appropriately. If, for example, students from Berkeley with 3.6 GPAs do as well as students from Brown with 3.8 GPAs once they get into medical school, the medical school may want to use a 0.2 adjustment when comparing Berkeley and Brown applicants’ GPAs. The only problem is that there may not be enough of a sample from small or obscure undergraduate schools.</p>
<p>idgi, if you get a 4.0 i’m pretty sure you won’t be worrying about grade inflation or deflation. don’t think about what other schools are doing and just do the best you can at Cal. if you don’t like the stats about the “odds” of getting into med school through the cal route, then you can always choose to go somewhere else. if you don’t have that luxury (be it b/c of lower merits or low finances) then you just have to keep you chin up and keep climbing.</p>
<p>med school will take those who are <em>most</em> qualified. note, i’m not saying they take people who are merely qualified. many are qualified. highly qualified. but who is <em>most</em> qualified and most <em>desirable</em>? school brand is a big factor and that is why many top private schools will always have an “advantage.”</p>
<p>when life gives you lemons…</p>
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<p>Yes. </p>
<p>@choroidal When looking at GPA do you calculate all college GPA? For example, I want to do a post bacc med program at a state school, so would you combine the GPA from the program and undergrad GPA and look at the overall GPA?</p>
<p>So is UCLA pre-med just as “INSANE” as Berkeley if you’re a Biology or Neuroscience major?</p>
<p>If your post-bac GPA is much better than your undergrad GPA we usually looked at that very favorably. But, I think every med school handles the post-bac thing differently. There are no hard and fast rules.</p>