MCB=STRONG, then why med school admit rates so low?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of California - Berkeley
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do all of those schools not have screenings for med school students?

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Its true that there is screening at other midtier schools like Berkeley

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Harvard screens its pre-meds- it's called the acceptance and rejection letters.

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<p>Let's clear things up right now. I know for a fact that there is no screening done at either Harvard or Berkeley. I am almost certain that there is no screening done at Yale or Princeton (although I can check).</p>

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<p>What I meant was that getting into Harvard is so hard that it's screening a good deal of people at the beginning, and pre-med classes at most school could be counted as a type of screening, although you are most certainly referring to the Hopkins like board of judges.</p>

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<p>CantSilence, why don't you send a letter to the career center? If you want, you can message it to me through a pm and I'll edit it to make sure it isn't rude or something, but why don't you do it? You could help the school and other people, and it will be much stronger coming from your hand.</p>

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US news rankings rated cal's biological sciences 2nd in the nation

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<p>This is a graduate school ranking. There is only an indirect relationship between grad quality and undergrad quality. </p>

<p>I'll put it to you this way. The elite LAC's can generally boast of having a placement rate of 75%+, yet none of them have top-ranked graduate biology departments (because most of them don't even have graduate biology programs, and the rare ones that do are not huge research powerhouses). </p>

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NOTRE DAME AND MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS HAVE A COMMITEE AND HENCE THEY SCREEN OUT STUDENTS THEY THINK WILL NOT GET INTO MEDICAL SCHOOL

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<p>Is this really true? I'd like to see the evidence that Notre Dame really does have a committee that will screen premeds from applying to med-school.</p>

<p>Nevertheless, what I can say is that I know for a fact that Harvard, MIT, and Stanford do not have such committees. I am almost certain that Princeton and Yale do not have such committees either. </p>

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3. berkeley's information is incomplete, the career center only has data from those who provided it , and those numbers are too small to make a conclusion by.

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<p>True, Berkeley's information is incomplete, but so is the information from every other school. If Berkeley's incomplete data indicates a placement rate of 67% and Harvard's incomplete data indicates a placement rate of 90%, then I think it's safe to say that Harvard places better than Berkeley does. I know of no reason to believe that the missing Berkeley information would include lots and lots of students who got in, but just didn't report it, yet the Harvard missing data would not be of the same nature. In other words, I know of no reason why the Berkeley data would be any more skewed than the data from any other school.</p>

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How does quality of the biology program actually affect med-school admissions? Is there even a correlation, one that goes away if the school as a whole is say, out of the US News top 50 or something? Why assume the correlation?

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<p>I think Drab has hit it spot-on. There is no reason to believe that there is a strong correlation between a strong bio grad department and strong premed placement rate. If there is a correlation, it must be a weak and indirect one. Just because a school has a high grad bio ranking doesn't make it a good place to go for premed, and vice versa. Again, take a look at the premed success of the LAC's.</p>

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<p>in respect to 3. that's not true because privates do a way better job of tracking its applicants and students so probably like they have 95 % of its students accounted for and cal would be lucky if it has 30% accounted for</p>

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<p>what is the admit rate for ucla's students into top med schools? does ucb and ucla send about the same number of students to top med schools each year?</p>

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<p>also, ucb IS a public school and has a huge student body that consist of students that were not selected as carefully as harvard. So i think the lower numbers at the high 60's smthing is really really good.</p>

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<p>THere is a strong correlation between sats and mcats and lsats etc.
UCB does not have sats scores that are comparable to the top lacs and hyps. Grad schools count on these tests greatly. It makes sense that they have lower admissions rates. They actually do quite well when seen in that light.</p>

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<p>can't count 100% on these numbers, but..</p>

<p>one of the premed panel students at calday said the OVERALL premed acceptance rate at cal is....40%. apparently at UCLA it's 50%, which i think is significant enough to matter. the handout at the presentation said that students who had a 3.4+ and an MCAT score of...i can't remember exactly...30+? had an 86% acceptance rate, but that's not very reliable without knowing exactly how many students have above a 3.4 at cal (no easy feat) and can score at least a 30. i assume what the student told me was true, so a large number of premeds have below a 3.4, which does not bode well for med school admission. in addition, it's difficult to transfer out at cal without a high gpa, which sort of entails a catch-22.... they're basically stuck there.</p>

<p>in addition, none of the panel members were going to med school right after graduation. in fact, 1 graduated in 4.5 years and another in 5. they did have a member who was currently at ucsf (a collective gasp sounded throughout the room- pretty amsuing), but also took a year off after graduation to build her resume. while this isn't a bad practice or anything, it would definitely be better, of course, to get in right after graduation. i've heard it's in fact necessary to take a year off after cal just because students are so burned out.</p>

<p>as for the elite privates, i doubt they have such screening committees. but cal definitely cannot compete with the services offered by these private schools, such as resume building, workshops, etc.. simply because it's a large public school. selectivity at cal accounts for the lower acceptance rate number, but it can't be denied that cal is significantly underrepresented at the top med/biz/law/grad/etc. schools when the top students at cal are definitely the same quality as the top calibre students anywhere, and a part of this is due in fact to the help you would get at a private school. it matters. combined with the academic rigor and incredible competitition, it's not exactly the best place to go for premed.</p>

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<p>I wonder where these folks got their information....as the Career Center at Berkeley reports a roughly 70% medical school acceptance rate.</p>

<p>And btw, The MCAT is out of 45, so you probably meant 30+, not 130+</p>

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<p><a href="http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/2004seniors.stm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/2004seniors.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>This was the latest data set I could find....but I heard that for 2005, the acceptance rate at Cal increased to >70%</p>

<p>Not bad for a California public school without a pre-med commitee i'd say.</p>

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<p>If you have a near 4.0 at any good school and study your but of for the MCAT and do ecs ect, you're probably going to be burned out after a few years.</p>

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<p>well, when people say cal isn't that great at this or that or whatever, it's relative. i mean, berkeley is obviously a GREAT school. so when i say the premed acceptance rate/program isn't that great, i mean in comparison to the elite privates. and i think in the applications process, private school students will generally always have the advantage because of the "help" they'll get.
a 4.0 at any school is tough, but who would be more burned out- the 4.0 at berkeley, or the 4.0 at stanford? (again, these are general statements.)</p>

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This was the latest data set I could find....but I heard that for 2005, the acceptance rate at Cal increased to >70%

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<p>You have to remember that this stat is for graduating seniors, not overall (Cal refuses to publish an overall stat). Graduating senior stats are almost always higher than overall stats because the fact is, a disproportionate percentage of the better students will get admitted to med-school as graduating seniors. Put another way, if you didn't get admitted as a graduating senior and you apply again the following year, you are probably still not going to get in. </p>

<p>Berkeley does publish a "one year out" stat and you can see that generally, the "one year out" students have a lower placement rate than the graduating seniors do.</p>

<p><a href="http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/MedStats.stm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/MedStats.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>