<p>When I was a Vanderbilt undergraduate 20+ yrs ago, I took organic chemistry over the summer at a local state university.</p>
<p>Vanderbilt accepted the hours for the summer organic courses toward my degree - they would not assign a GPA to those hours, but they did give me 8 hours of degree credit. When I applied to med school, I simply submitted 2 transcripts (one from Vanderbilt and one from the State Univ).
This allowed me to graduate in 3 yrs when combined with my AP credits.</p>
<p>Is this practice still done today for pre-meds? (Ie, taking organic over the summer at a university closer to home instead of dragging it out over two semesters at one's "main" university?).</p>
<p>Do schools still accept credits this way on a case by case basis?</p>
<p>It seems some private universities are a little more tight-fisted nowadays for granting hours for AP credit and transfer credit, but if it allows you to graduate a year early, saves a lot of $.</p>
<p>Anyone out there with current knowledge on this subject?</p>
<p>The issue with summer courses and pre-med isn’t usually on the university side but on the med school side. The summer courses are viewed as inferior - especially if taken at a school considered to be inferior to one’s home institution.</p>
<p>the general rule of thumb is: do not take premed prereqs over the summer without a really good reason. (if the goal is to graduate earlier, then take some GE’s or electives over the summer instead of premed prereqs.</p>
<p>My son did his Orgo sequence at JHU during the summer after his freshman year. He talked to his pre-health advisor before taking those courses. She said, since he was taking them at his own school and as long as he doesn’t take any more pre-requisites during summer, he should be fine. One of my son’s classmates at JHU, took the Orgo sequence at his state school over summer. I know for a fact that quite a few Harvard and Dartmouth pre-meds do the Harvard summer Orgo sequence. Its hard to say how every school treats the summer courses. </p>
<p>In my son’s case, he did those courses in the summer to get some scheduling flexibility. He is an CS and Bio major with a minor in Linguistics. As it turned out the compressed nature of those courses (Orgo 1, Orgo 2 and Orgo Lab all in 2 months) was a bit too much for him to handle. It didn’t help that he took another course (against the recommendation of the Chem department) and was doing research and volunteering. He ended up with a B+ for the entire sequence and it took him quite a while to repair the damage. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to have too much impact on his admissions in this cycle and he is doing pretty well.</p>