<p>The strategy of taking premed courses at a community college is clearly a second-best strategy. Obviously if you can take those courses at your regular 4-year college and do well, that would be optimal.</p>
<p>The problem is that, as McCullough said, not everybody taking those courses at their regular college is going to do well - in fact, the grading curves utilized by those colleges dictates that many students will be stuck with poor grades. Those students would have probably been better served by taking those courses at a community college - a second best strategy to be sure, but still better than trashing their academic records with poor grades.</p>
<p>Like I’ve always said, the med-school admissions process, unfortunately, has devolved to a game of avoiding bad grades. Better to not take a difficult class at all than to take it and be stuck with a bad grade. Sad but true.</p>
<p>I do not understand where people got an idea that getting high GPA at state schol is easy. It is not at all for students that could have been accepted to Ivy’s. This belief is probably spread by Ivy’s people who have no idea about state schools. The only valid comparison is to use results of standardised tests, since they are the same in whole country. I am not sure if it ever been done. Otherwise, how you can compare them?</p>
I did it a couple years back for pre-law students. There are some sampling problems (e.g. what about students who wanted to apply to law school but couldn’t) and it’s a relatively narrow population (e.g. no premeds).</p>
<p>It turns out that after you correct for eventual LSAT score, top schools have much lower GPAs, on average, than state schools. MUCH lower.</p>
<p>I believe I did not say explicitly that getting high GPA at state school is easy. If it comes out that way, I apologize. I am of the opinion that getting a very high GPA at most schools, private or state, is not easy.</p>
<p>However, I suspect (but have no evidence to support my claim) that, if you go to a state school, it may require a slightly higher GPA in order to be very competitive. This is mostly because there are much more students at a state school and the medical schools are not able to admit so many students from a state school. (I know that it may be not fair.)</p>
<p>Also, if I remember correctly, several years ago, some one who contributed to this board frequently rant about “premed factory” privates. (yes, some students from private schools indeed come out as arrogant or even obnoxious. He rant about this because of his unpleasant experiences dealing with some tense/uptight private school students he taught at an MCAT prep class.)</p>
<p>Since there are fewer students per class in a private, and not all premed students have a stellar GPA, it is likely that you may need a SLIGHTLY lower GPA to get admitted into a medical school if you go to a private college.</p>
<p>Not long ago, I bumped into some statistics about “students graduated with an honor” at a private school. There are like only 97 science majors who graduate with a GPA higher than 3.75 or 3.76. There is not a single 4.0 premed student in most years. Since that school routinely produces 200-250 medical school applicants each year, there may be many successful premed students who have a GPA in the 3.5-3.6 range. This leads me to believe that GPA-wise, you may have a slight advantage by going to a private. The “break” in GPA may not be significant though, like 0.1 at most.</p>
<p>Edit: BDM, I have just cross-posted. Your data may be more authoritive. Mine is just my own “guestimation.”</p>
<p>^ Actually, many private schools pump out an enormous number of pre-meds, so it might not be as much about worrying that they are accepting too many state students as the fact that it is easier at many public schools to get higher GPAs. I believe this, and I went to a public school.</p>
<p>I have spoken to adcoms about this, and they have said that a schools reputation for grade deflation or difficulty can contribute as much as .3 to a GPA, but usually it is much lower.</p>
<p>^ One premed from a private school once made the following remark when he was a senior student: Sometimes he feels that every student from his school is 1) aspired I-banker, 2) pre-law or 3) premed. He exaggerated it of course. But a lot of ambitious students (“gunners”?) are on the premed track at this kind of school. To some extent (sad or not), “private” = “preprofessional”.</p>
<p>I think you may want to consider things outside of the GPA that these schools offer. Is Penn a smaller school with a higher faculty:student ratio, therefore making it easier to find a research mentor there? </p>
<p>I went to a small Ivy League school and I found that to be the biggest up-side - great research opportunities.</p>
<p>Hi,i am an immigrant(just here for a year) who happens to be taking a double major of math and computer science at a third tier state school on a full ride. i have a 3.8 GPA and was wondering if staying at my school would hurt my graduate school chances since there is no research undertaken here in the summer.what should i do?</p>
<p>I still find it highly unlikely that anybody will actually receive worse than a C at Penn barring extraordinary circumstances such as academic misconduct, as evidenced by the fact that nobody can say for sure that they know somebody who has (i.e. “have friends who have either received a really poor grade, or close to it” doesn’t mean that the person received worse than a C).</p>
<p>But putting that issue aside, a larger issue is at stake, which lies at the heart of the issue: if it truly is possible to fail science or math courses, whether at Penn or elsewhere, the implication then is that it is impossible to fail non-science/math courses, which begs the question: why? Put another way, why are certain majors graded harder than others? Shouldn’t they all be graded with the same level of harshness? What’s fair is fair: if it is possible to fail science/math courses, then it should also be possible to fail nonscience courses.</p>
<p>If enough people are screaming “it is not far”, sooner or later we will rely more and more on the results of standardised tests like MCAT (or LSAT in law school admission). Should this happen, it would be unfair to some smart students who happen to have a various degree of LD. Heck, some may claim (often correctly) that some “personal characteristics” besides the academic capability are even more important in many professions. How can we evaluate that by GPA/test scores?!</p>
<p>A colleague who is a recent immigrant told me that, back in the country he came from, the grades given by professors do not count for anything as far as the graduate school admisson is concerned. ECs does not count for anything either. The reason is that once these two factors are included as a part of merit evaluation, there will be endless of “loopholes” and it will be even more unfair. Essentially, they think professors are not trust-worthy in giving grades in an objective way. So the evaluation is based on standardized tests exclusively. Let us ask this. Will we rather have that kind of system? I would say most would say no.</p>
<p>bdm,
“It turns out that after you correct for eventual LSAT score, top schools have much lower GPAs, on average, than state schools. MUCH lower.”</p>
<p>Does you statement mean that pre-meds are better off attending state schools for UG, since they are more likely to get higher GPA there? I am not sure if we are talking about the same standardized tests. I meant standardized test for subjects like Chem and Orgo for final exams. They are the same in whole country. My idea was that if student in school A are getting much higher scores on them than at school B, the valid assumption is that school A has much more rigorous class in this subject. Now I am not sure if that is what you meant.</p>
<p>MDP: I have no idea what these standardized tests you’re referring to are. I certainly have never seen them. In any case, it does mean that high grades are easier to get at state schools.</p>
<p>Again, remember the limitations: these are students who will eventually be applying to law schools, not medical schools, and it omits anybody who dropped out of that track midway through.</p>
<p>Moreover, it doesn’t necessarily mean that students ought to chase that grade inflation. Notice for example that some schools have very different average GPAs among their accepted premeds: Penn is around 3.35 while Case Western is around 3.75. So it’s actually okay to get lower grades at Penn than you would at Case.</p>
<p>Interestingly, these averages do NOT seem to chase prestige and they do NOT seem to chase grade inflation. MIT, for example, is both very prestigious and very deflated, and yet their accepted students average a 3.7.</p>
<p>Actually, I would say yes. If the problem is that the current standardized tests are deficient in some way, then the answer is to design a better test. </p>
<p>The problem with relying on grades is that, as I’ve said, different schools, different majors, and different profs have different standards, with certain grading being easier than others, which then leads to the sad if effective strategy of cherry-picking one’s way through easy classes while avoiding difficult ones.</p>