I want to apply early decision to UChicago, but I’ve heard that there lots of grade deflation. Is this true/does it matter compared to all the other schools? I live in a college town that is relatively easy to get good grades and plus I get free tuition (since my parents are professors there) that I am almost sure to get accepted in. However, part of me doesn’t want to go to a place where I have lived my whole life in a small town in the Midwest. I was wondering if going (theoretically, if I get accepted) to UChicago and the tuition and grade delation, etc. is worth it compared to the public college with free tuition, considering that I’m pre-med.
@bread2123 Complete your UG at your local place and get free tuition. The 3 or 4 more years you need to spend in the same place is nothing against your life span of 80-100 years. Develop patience now since that is so much needed when dealing with patient later.
Choose a MD school far away from the place you live now and fulfill your dream.
If you’re asking whether med schools will give special consideration for an allegedly grade-deflated GPA from certain undergrads–the answer is NO.
Adcomm do not add “bonus points” to your GPA if you went to UChicago, Cornell, MIT, WashU, Berkeley, UCLA, or any of dozens of allegedly grade deflating schools. (LOL, ask any pre-med and they will all tell you that they attended a grade deflating undergrad…)
The MCAT is great equalizer when it comes to med school admissions. Adcomms expect both–a strong GPA (no matter where you went to college) and a great MCAT score.
While I’ll admit that the prospect of free tuition is a tremendous inducement to stay local, I also understand the need to get away from a small town and the desire to establish a sense of independence by living away from home. I won’t presume to tell you what decision to make. I will suggest, however, that you do take finances into consideration when making a decision. Try to minimize your undergrad debt (and try not to bankrupt mom & dad) because med school is seriously expensive.
When choosing a undergrad, I always recommend that a pre-med take 3 things into consideration:
- finances (see paragraph above)
- opportunities (for things like-- campus involvement in clubs, research & volunteering; for strong pre-med advising; for alternate majors & career paths because most pre-meds don’t stick w/ pre-med and every pre-med needs a Plan B career in their pocket because >60% of those who apply to med school, don’t get accepted)
- fit (because happier students do better academically)
Colleges with heavy or rigorous general education or core curricula (e.g. MIT, Chicago) may be somewhat disadvantageous for pre-meds, since each additional required course could be a course in a subject that the pre-med is not strong at and therefore a greater risk of getting a bad grade (for pre-med purposes, anything below A-). In contrast, at an open curriculum school like Brown, the pre-med can choose courses only in his/her presumed strongest areas (his/her major and the pre-med courses).
Depends on which Med school you want to go to, if its just any med school then yes go to a school where its easier to get a 4.0, but if you want to go to a top med school for whatever reason then you’ll not only need to go to a top undergrad but also have top grades, not an easy achievement.
Example: here is a list from a top med school (UMich) by undergrad.
Institutions with Highest Numbers of Students
University of Michigan, Wash U, Harvard, UCLA, Wayne State, U Southern CA, Cornell, Duke, Hope, Northwestern, UC-Berkeley, U Chicago, Notre Dame, U Penn, Yale
I keep reading this over and over in various places- that med schools don’t care where you do undergrad, it’s all about GPA and scores. I really find that hard to believe though- that a med school wouldn’t be more impressed by a 3.5 from Yale or U Chicago than by a 3.75 from a lesser school.
That said, most flagship state schools I think are rigorous enough in the pre-med requirements not to hurt your chances. But I might be a bit nervous applying to med school from smaller state school branches or non-flagships.
Medical school admission officers are pretty agnostic about what undergrad you attend so long as the school provides sufficient rigor in the coursework–and any college or university in the top 300 or so will do that.
For students attending lesser known or regional colleges–a strong MCAT score goes a long way to assuaging any concerns an adcomm member has about whether that applicant can be successful in med school. IOW, an applicant isn’t going to rejected just because they attended a small, regional college if everything else about their application is good.
And GPAs are not trump cards-- a student with 3.9 GPA isn’t automatically considered an better applicant than a student with a 3.4. Once an application has met the consideration threshold at a particular med school (and those typically range from 3.2 to 3.5), the application will get reviewed. Higher stat applications may get read sooner than lower stat ones, but they all eventually get reviewed.
Med school admissions are holistic; GPA is just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
(BTW, Yale has pretty serious grade inflation going on-- even according to Yale students and faculty–but Yalies don’t get their GPA adjust downward when applying to med school.)
You can just ignore the UMich numbers, OP stay with facts that are printed. 10 of the schools listed above are top undergrad schools,
In my opinion, if you are premed, then you should keep your “eye on the prize”. The prize is admissions to medical school.
Top universities such as Harvard and Chicago do have a higher percentage of their undergrads get into medical school. However, every student who attends Harvard or Chicago is a student who was able to get accepted to Harvard or Chicago in the first place. These were all very strong students way back in high school. A high percentage will have been the #1 top student in their high school. The student who finishes in the bottom half of the class at these schools and does not get into any medical school was still a very strong student, and might have done better relative to other students if they had attended a different university.
Do not take premed classes at your local university lightly. When you say “relatively easy to get good grades”, it sounds like you have not taken any premed classes there yet (which is of course expected). You are going to find premed classes much tougher than you are expecting.
Also, medical school is very expensive. You need to budget for eight years of university. When you get your MD and start your residency, you don’t get paid much as a resident. You want to have as little debt as you can.
I think that you are better off with free tuition at your local university.
Of course, if we knew the name of your local university, there is some chance that this might make it easier to give accurate advice.
Doctor is a popular dream for smart kids coming out of high school. Almost none of them actually go to medical school. As you mature, you find that you might have passions in other areas. Never go to a college because of “premed prestige.” Chances are, you’ll change your mind about medical school and you don’t want to be stuck at a school you hate or can’t afford.
That being the case, medical schools look at grades and MCAT scores. Grades are a reflection of you, not the school, and medical schools know that. They get applications from students all over the country. Also, medical school is ridiculously expensive. Going into medical school with a mountain of undergraduate debt can be a major liability for you if you have to take out private loans to finish medical school. It really pays to take a scholarship. If you can graduate debt free, it shows a a degree of maturity and practicality that can make a big difference in the selection process.
@DadTwoGirls is correct, If you just want to go to med school (and it will probably be a DO school) then flagships or close to it will suffice.
All medical schools are “good”, and don’t agree at all that you will be limited to DO schools(which are fine schools, by the way) if you attend a state flagship. There’s no evidence to support this. Even HMS likes to mention, in addition to its awesome GPA/MCAT numbers, that it has students from 74 undergraduate institutions.
https://meded.hms.harvard.edu/admissions-at-a-glance
And for many state schools, it’s clear that state of residence is a large factor. Using University of Maryland as an example, 74% of their class of 2022 students were Maryland residents.
https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/media/SOM/About-Us/docs/JusttheFacts7-19.pdf
Is it too late to look at Tuition Exchange to see if your parents’ free tuition benefit could be used at another college? Might be the ideal way to get out of your hometown for a while but at little cost.
@DadTwoGirls The college is Miami University (in Ohio), also I have taken Calc 1 and 2 as well as Human Physiology (and other a few classes) where I did fine.
@LuckyCharms913 I don’t think that university is on the Tuition Exchange list, but I am not sure how tution exchange works. Thank you though, as I did not even know it existed before.
You may also want to take a look at this(the health career advising at Miami)
https://miamioh.edu/cas/academics/programs/mwche/academics/advising/index.html
There was a long since gone poster whose daughter got a full tuition scholarship to Miami Ohio, and subsequently went to CWRU
You’ll be fine at Miami. There used to be poster on this site whose daughter went to Miami of Ohio, did well, scored well on her MCAT (but—warning justifiable parental bragging ahead— not as well as my D1 did) and was accepted to Case Western for med school. Her D finished her dermatology residency this past June. (Or at least was when she was scheduled to finish. Her mom has been on this site for 3 years now.)
Yeah, yeah, I know N=1, but still it shows you’re not condemned to a DO school (which are fine schools and produce excellent doctors) just because you don’t enroll at UChicago.
BTW, UMichigan acceptances are somewhat skewed because UMichigan is a state supported med school and is required to enroll 65% of its class from in-state residents. I’m sure some portion of those Cornell, Chicago, Berkeley, etc grads are in-state residents since many parents from the wealthier suburbs send they kids OOS for college despite having UM in their backyard. My brother who lives in one of those 'burbs says this preference for OOS colleges is quite common. (BTW, my other D worked for UM SOM for a couple of years before she decided to apply to med school herself. She talked to plenty of people in admissions and researched UM’s enrollment policies and data quite carefully before she wrote down what state she considered her permanent address on AMCAS.)
I have always been skeptical of the claims that where you go undergrad has no bearing on professional school admissions like med school and law school, but I have no recent experience with this as I went to law school in the 80’s (UCB) and my brother to med school (UM) also in the 80’s as OOSS’s. We both had disproportionate classmates from the more prestigious/highly ranked schools. Things may well be different these days.
But I got curious about this thread. Most colleges have info on medical school outcomes for their undergrads. See this page for Univ of Miami Ohio. https://miamioh.edu/research/proposal-prep/institutional-data/med-school-admits/index.html See this for UChic. https://careeradvancement.uchicago.edu/uchicago-careers-in/health-professions/pre-health-faqs From this data, we see the avg GPA for successful Miami premed students is 3.75 while that for Chicago is 3.66. With some more sleuthing you can likely find out into which medical schools those graduates got in. UC provides a quick summary but no details, but they purposefully list some of the top med school programs in the country.
OP should dig into this type of data for each school he/she is considering.
But the trick-and OP’s stated concern-is getting that 3.66 at Uchicago. And under the FAQs of the page listed by you, UC decides to get positive about deflation-as in
Q: “I have heard that UChicago does not have grade inflation…”
A: “You are correct—we do not have grade inflation.”