<p>What is Carleton's record with its pre-meds? Does anyone know a percentage of students who were admitted into medical schools?</p>
<p>i don't know any numbers, but i've talked with admissions officers and they told me that carleton is a very well respected school as far as med/law school goes... just as respected as any of the other big name universities</p>
<p>I believe the med school acceptance is about 75% on the first try, and law school is pretty close to 100% (I'm sure there are some who only apply to top law schools and then don't get in, but I don't know the exact numbers...).
With grad schools in general, Carleton does really well.</p>
<p>When I talk to people about Carleton, most have never heard of it. Is it different in the graduate realm? Do Carleton graduates go on to big name universities for grad school?</p>
<p>crixx:</p>
<p>Ill try to respond to your question generally and specifically. Sorry for the length of the post, but theres no succinct answer to offer.</p>
<p>People in the know at grad/professionals schools have enormous respect for Carleton. They understand the rigor of the undergrad program and know that students leave after four years ready for anything they can throw at them. You probably know that the vast majority of graduates eventually go on to some form of advanced study. Approximately 10% of a class ultimately heads off to medical school, a similar number to law school. PhD production out of Carleton is particularly high. In fact, it ranks 6th amongst all US colleges and consistently produces higher percentages of doctorates than graduates from HYPS. </p>
<p>Looking from a different angle (and hoping not to get into a debate about the value of ranking methodology), as judged by college presidents, provosts, and deans, Carletons US News peer assessment score of 4.4 is bested among LACs only by Amherst, Swarthmore, Williams and Wellesley. This is particularly remarkable given the Northeastern bias suspected in the derivation of these numbers. In broader perspective, Carletons assessment among top national academics is similar to that of Duke, Northwestern, Brown and Penn.</p>
<p>With regard to specific grad programs pursued, theres some limited information available. Among physics graduates, for example, over the last 3 years:</p>
<p>2005: Berkeley, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin(2), Boulder
2006: MIT(3) George Washington, Columbia, Rice, Penn State, Illinois, Duke
2007: Princeton, Cornell, SUNY Stony Brook, Colorado, Penn State, New Mexico</p>
<p>(MIT, Berkeley, Cornell, Princeton, Illinois are top 10 star programs in physics - most of the remaining schools offer exceptional departments and generally round out the top 20) </p>
<p>A more general listing re: Carleton grads from one of the college info sites:<br>
"List of graduate schools most often selected by recent graduates:
California at Berkeley, Harvard U, U Michigan, U Minnesota, U Wisconsin."</p>
<p>Hope this has been of some help. Good luck.</p>
<p>also, i know that berkeley specifically looks for geology majors from carleton.</p>
<p>Thanks 1190, that was very helpful. On a related topic, how is the grade inflation/deflation? A top 5 LAC, it certainly won't be easy, but do the professors make it difficult to score well in their classes? I've seen Carleton compared to schools such as UChicago where the academics are obscenely rigorous. Do students struggle to maintain a B or do the teachers award good grades if the students earn them?</p>
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I've seen Carleton compared to schools such as UChicago where the academics are obscenely rigorous.
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<p>Sorry to step in on a Carleton thread, but I'd like to clear up a bit of a misconception about my own school.</p>
<p>Are academic rigorous at Chicago? Yes. Are they obscenely rigorous? Not for the students who want to be here. Most Chicagoans chose the school knowing that easier options existed, and if students were really that unhappy about the academic life, they know how to transfer. </p>
<p>Carleton strikes me as similar to Chicago in this regard-- the kind of person who ends up attending either place likes academics enough so that "working" doesn't always feel like "working" and that there's a whole lot more to life than just grades. A lot of my U of C friends considered Carleton and a lot of my Carleton friends considered the U of C (Carleton didn't make it to my list because it was too small and too remote for my taste, but I do kick myself from time to time for not considering it more seriously). The person who first got me interested in the U of C did his undergrad at Carleton and went on to the U of C for a masters' degree. He loves both schools.</p>
<p>The average GPA of graduates is sitting right now around a 3.4 or so. Good grades are not really harder to come by here than at peer schools, but it varies widely by department. Some professors (a couple in econ and polisci come to mind) are stingy with A-range grades, but most professors readily give out as many A's and A-'s as they want. B's are pretty easy to get (especially in classes with primarily subjective grading of papers/participation) as long as you actually put in the effort, and most people who end up with a grade below a B or B- or so make it go away through the scrunch process. Basically, at the beginning of every term you can designate one of your classes that isn't counting towards your major as having the Satisfactory/Credit/No Credit option (aka SCrNC or scrunch). The policy is explained in detail at <a href="http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/dos/handbook/academic_regs/?policy_id=21531%5B/url%5D">http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/dos/handbook/academic_regs/?policy_id=21531</a> . You can actually activate the scrunch designation up to 5 times, so unless you keep taking classes in areas you suck at or are bad at guessing what classes you might want to not get a letter grade in, you can protect your GPA pretty easily.</p>
<p>Yeah, just to follow up with my own sense of Carleton grading: It was not too difficult for most students to do the work and stay consistently in the B range in most classes. For most of the classes I took, you really had to push for the As. I don't have the exact data, but I'm guessing Carleton is not dramatically different in grading from other highly selective LACs, but probably grades tougher than some of the more grade-inflated ivies and national universities.</p>
<p>Summary: For most people, Carleton is a bad place to go if you want to impress people in your schools and community. Its a very good place to go if you want to impress graduate schools.</p>