How are pre-med classes at Vanderbilt? Has anyone heard about grade inflation or deflation?
Excellent & rigorous. You also have VU’s med. center on campus for research, work, and shadowing opportunities. The average GPA at Vandy is about 3.42 which is well below the grade inflation universities, Yale, Brown, Harvard. A little below Georgetown, Duke, Emory, Stanford. Similar to UPENN, Cornell, Columbia, Wash SL, and a little higher than UC, MIT, Princeton, JHU, WFU, & Cal-B.
At most U’s the intro pre-med classes are graded at a C+/B- average. The problem at VU is everyone in your class is a 1%er test taker so you need to survive those classes.
Well, full disclosure, they’re called “weed-out” classes for a reason. I think it’s good and bad: some people that would make great doctors get discouraged by a C and walk away, but getting a D- helped me realize that I didn’t want to be a doctor enough to make it worth the work. IMO, they’re a very personal experience. What was hell for me has been a breeze for some others. And what’s a breeze for me is the worst for the same people. But I’m glad I took them and scraped by, I’ve never been more proud of such a terrible grade!
There are certainly easier schools for pre-med. Vanderbilt doesn’t inflate grades, but many top 40 schools do, so by comparison, some feel their grades are deflated (http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/3/grade-inflation-mode-a/).
As SusieAnne suggested, the difficulty of early courses like Chem, Orgo, Calc, and Bio actually do serve a purpose. A huge percentage of students come into school as pre-med because it’s a logical thing to do, but don’t truly have the motivation to see it through to the end. These courses help students figure out if it’s right for them early on
Don’t be too afraid of this – students do regularly get A’s and B’s in these courses. However, students who don’t put in a lot of time and effort usually end up with lower grades. I was one of them. They aren’t “study the night before” kind of classes.