JHU has been my one of my top schools, but after being accepted and calling them, it seems that nobody there keeps track of students’ average GPA and MCAT score when it comes to applying to medical school, which doesn’t make sense to me.
So that’s why I’m here. I’m absolutely positive that I won’t get the most accurate information by going to a thread like this, but it’s certainly going to give me more information than JHU’s Pre-Prof. office (I tried admissions and the registrar’s office too).
The reason I ask is because I have heard that JHU’s students’ average GPA’s are lower than other top tier institutions that grade-inflate, and I don’t want that to screw me over for medical school. And I don’t want to hear any comments like, “At JHU, you get the satisfaction of working hard and earning your grades rather than having them grade-inflated,” because that’s all BS.
So, for those of you who go to JHU or have accurate info, what is the typical GPA of a pre-med student at JHU? How hard is it to maintain a high GPA for med school at JHU?
After a little bit of persistence, I got some info in case anyone was wondering, through which the pre-prof office turned out to be helpful, guess I shouldn’t be too harsh on them:
“For fall 2014, the mean cumulative GPA for JHU’s accepted applicants was 3.66. The mean cumulative GPA for all undergraduates nationally was 3.72.”
Which means that JHU’s students are accepted to med schools with lower GPA’s… interesting.
That is interesting. I’d been told that was the case by many pre-prof officers and other students, but I was a little skeptical. The idea is that med school admissions officers know that Hopkins is a challenging school, and that there’s grade deflation, and take that into account… I don’t know how many med schools do that, but it’s nice to know that I don’t have to stress so much about my GPA, lol.
I also heard the thing about how getting a good grade through hard work is better than inflation. Eh… It’s more like, “At JHU you get the relief of working really hard and getting a higher grade than you thought you’d get because the class is curved… rather than having them grade-inflated.” Still, I do take pride in the fact that I work hard and put my 100% into my classes (except for the boring ones, lol).
GPA is a real concern, at all schools, but especially here. Some people compensate by purposefully taking “easier” majors or padding their schedule with easy courses to keep their GPA. Others (like myself) hold back on doing something that they would really like, like majoring in a difficult subject, because there’s a risk of it dropping your GPA. It’s really hard, I’ve realized, to just live your life when you know that it’s going to be evaluated in a few years.
But it hasn’t been overly hard to get a good GPA (although I’m taking a Stats class this semester that I’m not feeling good about). That being said, I was undecided my freshman year, so I didn’t take any premed requirements. But that being said, I took a lot of classes on subjects I had no background in, like computer programming and expository writing (surprisingly hard), and I made out all right…
Obviously, you need a higher GPA from UMD and a lower one from Caltech. They should also adjust to the grading scales of the schools as well as the major. When I was there, you needed a 3.2 in bioengineering: it is a difficult major without a lock of choice and the engineering and math classes grade harder than premed classes.
JHU has huge numbers of premeds and most of them get in, so it can’t be that bad a situation for getting in.
When I was there, the premed atmosphere was worse then now, and the taking easy classes was really bad, as was pretty much anything else you can think of. I would recommend for most people a less pressured and cutthroat premed environment, considering that all of them are like that, why go to one of the worst?