What selective colleges pile on the work? And which ones are stingy with grades? Opinions wanted please.
Background: D is a junior and recently her thinking has shifted away from a PhD science track, and more towards pre-med. We know she may change her mind again, so we are focusing here on selective colleges that are likely to provide a good education in whatever field she ends up in.
Colleges advertise the percentage of pre-med students that make it into medical school, but I hear these numbers are often massaged because poor performing students were often discouraged from applying in the first place.
Since grades matter a great deal for medical school (and law school), it might be useful to look at the workload at the college and how generous it is with grades. Some colleges are known for being piling on the work, making it difficult for students to just keep up, let alone distinguish themselves among very talented peers. Separately, some colleges are stingy with good grades, whereas others are generous with them.
So, I am asking CC members to provide opinions about colleges in the following format:
I will start:
Harvard:
Median GPA: A- / B+
Workload: Moderate
The Harvard students we know all seem to have plenty of time for activities outside of school. The workload outside of class seems to be average about 20 hours per week. The most common grade given at Harvard is an A-, but the median might be slightly lower, so on the border of A- or B+.
^^ How can you tell if Harvard’s “moderate” workload wouldn’t be a very heavy workload for an average student from some other school?
“A-/B+” is rather imprecise.
Wouldn’t that cover most of the selective colleges represented on gradeinflation.com?
Notice that the numbers listed for individual colleges often are years out of date.
Selective colleges that have a reputation for piling on work include Swarthmore, Reed, Carleton, and UChicago. Those reputations probably are very influenced by anecdotal reports from students/alumni, who may have an interest in playing up how “hard” their schools are. Students at some other selective colleges may like to play up how brilliant they are and how little they need to study. Transfer students would be a good information source for school-to-school comparisons (but transfer rates tend to be very low at selective colleges.)
I suspect that differences across peer colleges are less significant than within-college differences among majors, courses, and professors. College professors cherish academic freedom; I doubt many selective colleges set and enforce strict campus-wide grading or workload standards.
If it were possible to compare GPAs and workloads across selective colleges precisely and reliably, wouldn’t med school admission committees be aware of these differences? Wouldn’t they adjust their evaluations accordingly?
This is the reason I am limiting the discussion to selective colleges. Very capable students fill the class at Harvard, MIT, Duke, Chicago, WUSTL, Hopkins, etc. But the reputation remains that Chicago and MIT still push their students very hard. MIT basically tells students they must work as a group, as no individual can handle the work alone.
However, they would be comparing lower level courses at their old colleges to upper level courses at their new colleges.
Some might also ask graduate students to compare their undergraduate and graduate schools, but it may not be the best comparison to ask (for example) a chemistry PhD student how difficult general chemistry was at his/her undergraduate school when s/he was learning it the first time versus at his/her graduate school when s/he was TAing it after spending a few years studying chemistry.
Law school may be mostly stats-based (outside of YLS and Stanford, though a high LSAT is more valuable) but med schools look at everything and the private ones do seem to adjust for rigor. Frankly, med school admissions will be tough everywhere, and if you want an “easier” path, it may be the flagship public of your own state (unless you’re in MI or CA, where somewhere lower may even be better).
The outcomes seem very highly correlated with MCAT and GPA. For example, students scoring between a 30-32 on the old test, this corresponds to a 79-88th percentile. With this MCAT score, someone with a GPA between 3.2 - 3.4 had an acceptance rate of 46.6%, whereas someone with a GPA between 3.6 - 3.8 had an acceptance rate of 73.9%.
@hebegebe, right, but there would be correlation in that chart even if school/course difficulty is taken in to account.
As an example, say that a med school only has applicants from 2 schools, who send an equal number of applicants (and everyone gets the same MCAT score to simplify):
From School A, a GPA of 3.75-4 means a 90% acceptance rate and a GPA of 3.5-3.75 means a 50% acceptance rate.
From School B, a GPA of 3.75-4 means a 50% acceptance rate and a GPA of 3.5-3.75 means a 10% acceptance rate.
That chart would show a 70% acceptance rate for those with a GPA of 3.75-4 and 30% acceptance rate for those with a GPA of 3.5-3.75.
It would be nice of undergraduate schools with significant numbers of pre-meds showed similar MD school admission rate tables with the same GPA and MCAT ranges. Then one can compare whether a given undergraduate school offers some advantage for students with similar GPA and MCAT. However, one must still be careful of other factors that can affect admission rates (e.g. if an undergraduate school’s students are mostly from a state with a shortage of public MD school spaces relative to the population, versus a state with lots of public MD school spaces relative to the population), or the pre-screening of medical school applicants by a pre-med committee (this is seen by some as “gaming the stats”, but does have advantages for students, in that pre-meds with little or no chance will be told by the committee that it is not worth wasting time and money applying).
Harvey Mudd is not a good fit for most pre-meds. I do know one Mudder in my D’s class with a 3.8 that is headed for med school, but she is absolutely brilliant – the average GPA is around 3.3 when students graduate, and they are all working their tail off just for that. I know one student in D’s class transferred out after freshman year due to grade deflation and a desire to go to med school (fortunately first semester is P/F, so she really only had one semester of grades to take with her).
According to gradeinflation.com, Harvey Mudd’s average GPA was 3.31 in 2008 (the most recent year for which it is reported). In that year (or in the closest year with a reported GPA) , the averages were equal or lower at Berkeley, Case Western, JHU, Lafayette, Lehigh, Michigan, MIT, Princeton, Reed, Rensselaer, St. Olaf, UCLA, UVa, Virginia Tech, Washington & Lee, Wellesley, and William & Mary.
Peer colleges with GPAs above 3.40 in the same year (2008) included Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, Northwestern, NYU, Rice, Swarthmore, and Vassar.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find some pre-med courses/professors at Rice and Swarthmore that have equal/heavier workloads and equal/lower average grades than similar courses at Harvey Mudd. But I’m just speculating. It’s very hard to assemble good data to support these comparisons.
“…because poor performing students were often discouraged from applying in the first place.”
Unfortunately, the weeding is often done during freshman year or in the first premed courses. Most kids with premed intentions don’t get to the point where they need their college’s committee support.
Figures are almost never published for this weed, but it can be the bulk. So what you may want is colleges that are cooperative vs competitive in premed. And info about grade averages in those math-sci classes, not overall. The premed forum may offer you better insight.
A student that fails the screening at Selective U, because of highly capable peers, likely could have thrived at a less selective university and been admitted to medical school.
I disagree. That is the mindset that for someone to succeed, then someone else must fail. Sure in HS, only a set amount can be in the top 5% but in college unless there is a limit on A’s (Princeton removed theirs), then every student has a shot at a 3.8+ regardless of his/her peers’ performance.
Weed out courses have been part of college for a long time and they do a student a service, not disservice. It’s better to find out as a freshman or sophomore that premed isn’t for them whether by study discipline or aptitude. Then the student can adjust majors before paying for a four year degree that may not open many doors outside medicine (chemistry or biology).
Research opportunities are competitive but such is life.
Different kids perform differently in different environments.
Also, overall GPA’s are fairly useless. For example, the average GPA in some departments at Northwestern is more like a 3.0. At least for the basic pre-med classes.
Interesting that I didn’t see this…comparing workload and GPA is tricky as different schools and the departments within them achieve “rigor” in different ways as I have reiterated over and over again, and typically the course material speaks for itself. I have seen selective schools where the majority of instructors in a dept appear to give more standard level workloads and exam types, but don’t curve at all (because average is already at or above the expected norm) and many schools that have many STEM instructors that write harsh exams and then curve them to some norm (Harvard is actually one such school…I WOULD NOT underestimate STEM coursework there. Content and in terms of intellectual intensity, it and MIT and any near peers are not much different and for some courses it appears more intense. The primary difference is that typically courses are always curved to at least a solid B whereas maybe B- is more typical at MIT and most selective schools in the south). The schools with notorious chemistry sequences also use the “really hard exams, curve” model. If you attend such a school where typically it is the physical sciences following such a model, then it isn’t about relying on the curve so much as actually beating the curve which can be hard in such environments, because beating the curve involves being able to perform well on fairly difficult problem types that you may not have seen before.
You have to be good at “making it up” or deriving new strategies. So it is more about the ability to handle intellectual rigor vs. a high workload. Often a high workload, if you manage it can help buffer mediocre exam performances. Schools with higher workloads (minus STEM schools) tend to have higher GPAs (like those LACs known to pile on the work) which makes sense considering that exams and quizzes are not the only portion of the grade. There is also the nuance that more effective instructors may be using the higher workload (graded or not) as a tool to prepare you for high level exams that they want to give. Many instructors will basically just make students use the TA’s and TF’s to fend for themselves.
Biology departments also vary with better ones having many courses and instructors that focus on problem solving and research in the field whereas some have a great majority stick to textbook and more regurgitation and recall as the emphasis in their courses (but will throw TONS of content at the students). Schools like MIT and Harvard (and their peers) seem to have more of the former and of course this means lower averages and likely curved distributions because even the talented students they get are not, in mass, exposed to learning biology like that. They are used to the latter situation. I stumbled across Harvard’s life sciences 1a website before and the means of exams were consistently low and mid 70s and occasionally a high 60%. I’m fairly sure this wouldn’t be the case if the exams did not involve the high level of material and problem solving that they did. It was quite a bit different and more difficult than other selective schools not considered in Harvard’s tier (I would say Chicago, Stanford, MIT, Yale, Princeton, and Caltech…and it was even different from most of theirs but in comparison to most other selective schools, looked more like an advanced or intermediate molecular cell/biochemistry course. In fact, I would argue it is tougher than those courses at most other schools).
Looking at GPA and “workload” only scratches the surface when comparing among selective schools. Some of them just run their departments differently and some have managed to have a more uniform level of teaching and academic rigor (and type of rigor) even between instructors. At some schools, when a course offers multiple sections at once or 1 each semester, taking one instructor over another reveals a night and day difference in terms of how hard the students have to work or think.