<p>This isn’t necessarily a knock against Vandy, but I wish there were a few more relatively inexpensive places to eat w/in walking distance of campus. I’m thinking along the lines of like a Burger King/Chick-fil-a/IHOP/KFC/Sonic/Zaxbys. Panda Express would be cool although it’s highly unlikely.</p>
<p>vanderbilt13:</p>
<p>You are mistaken about grade deflation. As practiced, the grade deflation approach at Vanderbilt produces no real tangible benefit for Vanderbilt students.</p>
<p>It does however penalizes Vanderbilt students and is out of step with other 1st rate Universities.</p>
<p>I have been on an admissions committee at two Med Schools and I assure you that there are far too many applications to “adjust” GPA for how a school grades. The GPA while not the sole criteria is a very important criteria and is accepted as is for comparision between applicants. Thus a reduced GPA penalizes Vanderbilt students.</p>
<p>It also penalizes Vanderbilt graduates in the rating system used by US World Report which looks specifically at the rate that undergraduates are accepted at graduate school.</p>
<p>Vanderbilt is a fine school which explains why its applicants are accepted at the rate they are currently and the school is rated in the high teens of US universities.</p>
<p>If it practiced the grade policies of Universities of similar quality, it would probably significantly increase the rate that its students achieve graduate studies and crack the top 10 of US world report which would be of benefit for all concerned: faculty, students who stop their education at the college level and students who gone to graduate and professional school. It would also improve the admission acceptance rate.</p>
<p>I will say that I know absolutely nothing about how medical schools admit, but I do know that the law school admissions process adjusts for grade inflation or deflation through the admissions process as they use some kind of clearinghouse to compile the applicant information along with their testing information.</p>
<p>Fast food places on the edge of campus:
SATCO- it is REALLY cheap
McDonalds-on campus next to the hospital. Probably cheaper than BK
Qdoba-on 21st avenue across from Kissam
Pizza Hut Express and Taco Bell-in the Food Court at Children’s Hospital.Anyone can walk in and eat there and it’s also on campus.
Wendy’s-also on 21st avenue near the main library.
Panera Bread-on 21st avenue next to SATCO
There are plenty of cheap fast food places to eat on and near campus. Can’t say it’s quality,but it is cheap</p>
<p>There’s also Bread & Co, Subway, Chipotle, Jimmy Johns, Jersey Mikes, Jasons, Chekers, etc…</p>
<p>75%+ of my meals are fast food or regular restaurants and the same dozen places get real old real fast. In addition, there are just other places I’d prefer…Burger King >> McDonalds and Wendys.</p>
<p>And Satco isn’t REALLY cheap, let alone cheap. 9+ bucks for two tacos, chips & queso and a drink. Satco might be good for Nashville, but it pales in comparison to real Tex-Mex. A place where the menu is in spanish and english and there’s a decent chance that over half of the workers there are illegal immigrants and/or speak little to no english. At these places, you can easily get the same quantity, but better tasting meal for 5-7 bucks. Little known fact, Satco has buffalo wings and they’re reasonably priced, like 50 cents a wing, and actually pretty good.</p>
<p>Hard to believe that Law schools could adjust GPA. How would that be accomplished? Schools do not publish median grades per class externally. The average university offers hundreds of courses with individual courses often taught by different people at different times (during the day, at night, on line). It is essentially impossible for reliable data from every university and college to be compiled for an accurate adjustment. It is also very hard for me to imagine that a 4.0 in one school is reduced to a 3.5 because of grade inflation in that school.</p>
<p>More likely if there is an adjustment it is made on the national ranking of the University which of course goes back to US World Report or other rating institution which uses graduate acceptance rates as one of its criteria.</p>
<p>Can’t argue that SATCO isn’t that good.I usually get a tummy ache after D drags me in there. That’s probably why I have never spent more than 5 bucks in there.
Nashville will probably never be known for TexMex,since, surprise, this isn’t Texas. You might do better off getting some recipes and make your own TexMex to suit your tastebuds,and that would probably be cheaper too.
I don’t willingly support places that hire illegals in the hopes of getting “authentic” and super cheap food.
Until or unless you have access to a car, your choices will never be endless,but there are more choices than many people realize around the campus</p>
<p>I’m not going to get into a discussion over something as subjective as quantity and quality. What you might find good/large, I might find bad/average and so on. </p>
<p>And for the record, this is first line from Satcos website “Welcome to San Antonio Taco Company – the best place for Tex-Mex food in Nashville, Tennessee since 1984!” I love when people ask me to compare Satco to real Tex-Mex.</p>
<p>Just out of curiosity, when you buy fruit, do you go out of your way to check to make sure that illegals didn’t pick them?</p>
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<p>US News & World Report does not take into account “the rate that undergraduates are accepted at graduate school.” The ranking looks at inputs, not outcomes (which is one of the many reasons why it is flawed and inadequate).</p>
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<p>Which schools should Vanderbilt leapfrog into the top ten? Which top ten school should Vanderbilt replace?</p>
<p>For better or for worse, the US News college rankings do not look into acceptance rates into grad schools or (indirectly) “grade deflation,” per se. Princeton, for example, practices grade deflation. But that hasn’t adversely affected its US News ranking.</p>
<p>Sorry to cut in again as I don’t go here. Grade deflation cannot be considered the tendency for the intro. science classes to cap As or certain grade ranges at 25%. At Emory, the number of A/A- hardly ever reaches (I’ve never heard of it happening) this level in such courses and we do not have a cap. Should I call that deflation (actually people here like to claim deflation, but it’s simply not true, except for science courses that get a bell-curve, which are none of the intro. levels)? Let’s also mention that, from my understanding and research, Vandy actually has to curve intro. biology up a lot (this is already generous as it is). If that ever happens here, it’s like 1-2 points added to everyone’s grade. There, they do an orgo. style curve, by making the average or median a B- (so if the averages are normally 69-72 on test, this turns into a B-; this would not happen here). Grade deflation/low inflation is considered a steady trend of gpas downward (or very subtle increase/hovering) over “years”. Given this, Vandy, like almost all other Top 20s but Princeton, has inflation. In fact, more “inflation” (about .12-.13 compared to our .1 increase) than we have had over the last decade despite the fact that Vandy GPAs are still lower than ours. In essence, grade inflation/deflation is measured by the overall effects on GPAs come graduation time. The policy for the sciences there are not causing overall gpas to decrease over time, therefore it is not real deflation. Sorry to offend anyone who thought otherwise.</p>
<p>Pretty accurate on the B- average, for some classes. After having finished my 4 years at Vandy I am going to go against the suggestion that there is grade deflation. It’s just hard.</p>
<p>Yeah, it seems people cry grade deflation as soon as they have to work hard for an A range grade. Or better yet, they believe they deserve an A for simply working hard as opposed to providing a stellar performance that should result from that hard work. As for the As in classes like bio there, you have to keep in mind that, with such a curve-up policy, grade ranges below and above that B- are somewhat arbitrary as there are not clear cutoffs before or after. Thus, it is pretty hard to determine rather you deserve an A/A- w/o access to the whole grade distribution above that level. When there is such a curve, it actually makes sense to cut off A range grades to anyone below the top 25%. If there was no curve, and a strict, pre-determined grading scale this would make less sense. Emory’s NBB 301 class section in the fall cuts As to 10%. As for anything below that, who knows, except that they want the average to be about C+/B- after any up-curving (normally a high C+, just as the pre-med classes. Rarely are they exactly at 2.7).</p>
<p>Aren’t perfectly uninflated grades supposed to follow a gaussian distribution anyway? I’ve only been here a year, but it seems the averages in all the classes I’ve taken so far have been between a B- and an A-. That’s grade inflation, if anything.</p>
<p>Does Vandy release any stats on average grades and the like? I hear people whining about deflation a lot but I’ve never seen any hard data on the matter.</p>
<p>[url=<a href=“http://gradeinflation.com/Vanderbilt.html]Vanderbilt[/url”>Vanderbilt]Vanderbilt[/url</a>]</p>
<p>Found this on a site that studies this stuff.</p>
<p>This may or may not be reliable.
Probably is</p>
<p>Based upon my rising-junior daughter’s experience at Vandy, I don’t know if there is grade deflation throughout the school, but there certainly is a weed-out process in the pre-med required courses. She has received mostly A’s in non-science courses, but struggled in chem and calc, even after taking AP courses in both in high school. One-half of her Vandy calc class was gone by the middle of first semester, as was a large percentage of her chem lab. She has a high school friend at SUNY-Albany, who had considerably lower grades and SAT’s and did not have nearly the same high school coursework, that received A’s in the pre-med calc and chem courses
I don’t know that a non-pre-med person could major in a science at Vandy without being extraordinary in some way, I’m sure it happens, but probably rare</p>
<p>My only problem is that people here make this sound as if this weedout issue is unique to Vandy. This is actually very common and prevalent at nearly all of the top 20 schools. It is also common at the engineering schools such as Georgia Tech (which does not even rank in the top 20). Vandy is not special here. Top schools weed out pre-meds. Period. Orgo, bio, and gen. chem., NBB 301, psyche 110 and 111 are our primary weedouts here. Emory students also tend to do poorly in physics and the life science calculus series. Notice how we have also expanded the weeding out to the psychology department which is extremely difficult compared to many schools. Also, you should keep in mind that many pre-meds withdraw as soon they get a B or lower in the class, even if it is after the very first exam. Trust me, I’m not a pre-med student, but I have watched this happen in the science courses that I am taking which are mostly filled with pre-meds.</p>
<p>It is very sad that some drop out of perfectly good classes if they get a B or less. I can only imagine the pressure they are under.</p>
<p>But please consider the following. </p>
<p>Most Top Universities such as Vanderbilt have relatively uniform academic students with great high school academic records. Maintaining even a grade distribution with a median of 3.1-3.3 is not reflective of the quality of the individuals in the class and thus penalizes some students in the name of producing a grade curve.</p>
<p>It is not true in my experience (10 years on a medical school admissions committee) that the “weeding out” process is the same in all top Universities. Many top schools maintain relatively high curves (median B+ or higher) in the Premed classes. We never penalized these students for having high grades. Just the opposite, we tried to recruit them.</p>
<p>I am sure that others have different opinions and experiences and my purpose is not to argue the issue. This will be my last post on the issue.</p>
<p>My D has quite a few friends at University of Michigan. They report that the science weed-out courses are very difficult & have ruined many a students’ GPA. It’s not an issue only Vandy students have to deal with.</p>
<p>I am sure med school admissions folks have the same attitude that the UM undergrad admissions rep who spoke to my son’s high school displayed: I am often asked if we’d rather see all A’s with an easy course load or a lower gpa with a difficult course load. I always tell the students who ask this that we want to see students with all A’s with a difficult course load. (I know I would prefer my doctors to be the smartest of the smart! :))</p>
<p>Dude, college is supposed to be harder. Do you really think it’s supposed to be the same as highschool? Often college is a completely different environment where students are allotted a lot more unsupervised “freedom” over their lives. It is not rigidly structured like high school, thus many will struggle more. Also, many of these stellar applicants did not have to try nearly as hard as you think to do as well as they did. I mean, why do you think there are so many resume whore applicants in terms of extracurriculars? If the academics were so tough in high school, they shouldn’t have had time to merely tons and tons of ECs, often for the mere purpose of getting into a top college. The coursework in college should be more difficult, and should be graded as such. Colleges should expect more from students than the level of work they did in high school. Many hope that the same strategy of study will work in college, and thus grades reflect. Hopefully, we attended these schools to be challenged, not to receive a prestigious name on the degree and to be handed a comparable GPA to what we had in high school. High school is over! The reality is that many of us are no longer the smartest amongst our peers, and/or can use major improvement to get anywhere close to the grades we want. College should not dumb itself down because we were stellar applicants. Also, I hardly ever here of any top schools (other than perhaps some inflating Ivies and Stanford. But even they probably don’t do that) that curve to B+ in intro. courses. </p>
<p>And if you want inflation for stellar applicants, you already have it. Normally average GPAs at top public institutions with awesome students should be lower. By your idea, Georgia Tech (though it has a high admission rate, students have the same stats as they do at Emory and many other top schools), for example, should balloon (from 3.07) to an average graduating gpa of about 3.5+, and all privates in the top 20 should all be 3.6-3.7+ average. That is BS.</p>
<p>I’ll remember this one: “You were a stellar applicant, so we’ll go easy on you and make sure it appears as if you did as well as you did in high school”.</p>
<p>Kelsmom: I agree with you. I’m concerned about our prospective doctors that want to be spoon fed a pre-med education and passed off into med. school.</p>
<p>And also, you know that a B+ is a 3.3 right. That matches well with the other schools you speak of. And a 3.1 is a solid B. Again, if this is the case, this is high from my knowledge and experience. Pre-med classes here, by chance get about 2.5-2.8 averages. There is not even a curve limiting As for the courses with such distributions. The fact that Vandy curves up and has to limit As to get even the hypothetical distribution you propose tells one something. Am I supposed to suggest that Emory, or any school with pre-med courses with similar averages is too hard?
I would more likely agree if it was like our B-School curve which literally holds averages to 3.15, even though students came in with a 3.5+. However, they are perhaps trying to be realistic in exposing them to the business world where they will have to compete with each other, thus such a curve can be considered relevant by many.</p>
<p>I’m not quite sure why this is being debated all the time. People want to equate GPA’s with difficulty, and it seems quality of education. Moreover, don’t use the frat GPA’s as a representation of Vandy GPA’s when we are also talking about the premed curriculum. There was 1 senior bio major in a fraternity and he was an anomaly anyway.</p>
<p>Here’s the bottom line: If you are afraid of grade deflation at Vandy in the pre med curriculum DONT attend. That mindset won’t get you through the curriculum. It will just give you an excuse to complain about if you do poorly. Those who do well at Vandy, and I’m talking 3.7+ are rare in the premed curriculum. They work non stop, they don’t go out and rage on weekends, and they don’t complain about grade deflation.</p>
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I wish this was required reading for every premed.</p>