pre-med and grades

<p>I just visited another school and they explained that people are competitive with themselves because they want to do well, but they are not really competitive with each other becuase there is not a limit on how many people can get A's. In other words, they don't feel like they need to compete with other people. Is this the case at cornell? And can you get good grades (in premed classes) without drowning yourself in school work all the time?</p>

<p>weed out classes are based on others. if u get a 98 and the mean is a 99, say goodbye to the A. though most classes are not based on ranking so u technically just need to do well yourself to get the A. but in the end you will compete with others for med school acceptance</p>

<p>Yes and yes.</p>

<p>If you don't like competition, don't be premed. Right now most med schools have 50-100 applicants for each seat. Your competition is not the 200-400 other premeds at your school. It's the 46,000 other premeds across the country.</p>

<p>I've taken both curved and uncurved science courses at Cornell. There's no evidence that uncurved courses are easier. For example, I took Bio413 Histology (which is a first-year med school course by the way). It was uncurved. On the first prelim, 4 students got A's out of 40 students. At least in curved courses, we'll have 15-25% of the students getting A's guaranteed. </p>

<p>No one goes out of their way to sabatoge other people. There's 600 students in orgo. You'd need to sabatoge a lot of people to lower the mean in the class. No one's going to do that. But the students are studious and are going to do the best they can. This is the mentality you'll see in med school as well. It's a competitive but not cutthroat environment. Because it mirrors the med school environment, Cornell students do exceptionally well in med school. The ones I talked to have said that Cornell prepared them awesomely for their med school courses. I believe two valedictorians in recent years at Harvard Med were Cornellians.</p>

<p>Well I am going to Cornell or Northwestern, so would one be harder than the other? I realize it's hard to compare because you guys are Cornellians, but is pre-med at Cornell harder than it is at other top schools?</p>

<p>No. The difficulty at the top schools are about the same.</p>

<p>Thanks, norcalguy. By the way, i thought I'd let you know, you've been very helpful to me (and I'm sure many others) as a pre-med. I've read other Cornell pre-med threads and I always find your posts to be insightful.</p>