I heard someone talking and they said that their child was going to go to Brown as a Premed because Brown doesn’t give grades anymore.
Is that true? If so, how will med schools view that?
I’m thinking that it’s not really true and that premeds would have to choose the option for grades??
Wasn’t there an issue with JHU not giving grades for frosh?
Of course they do.
What Brown does though, is not limit the number of courses that can be taken S/NC. The expectation for premeds, though, is that required courses are taken for a grade.
Your Forum Champion colleague, @iwannabe_Brown , can add more texture to pre-med at Brown.
For the Brown grading system see https://www.brown.edu/campus-life/support/careerlab/index.php?q=employers/employer-resources/browns-grading-system
Many University websites are often a good source of information, but one has to hunt.
Medical schools will not accept P/F grades as fulfilling admission requirements, even though an undergrad may allow students to fulfill graduation requirements by taking P/F classes.
JHU covers first semester freshman grades and MIT covers, I believe, both semesters of freshman grades. That is, the student’s transcripts shows only Credit/No Credit for all coursework during those semesters. However, students from those school can request that any covered grades be uncovered on their transcripts so that their actual letter grades are displayed for AMCAS and med school adcomms to see.
There are a handful of colleges that don’t use grades (Reed College or New College of Florida, for example), but use narrative evaluations. AMCAS handles narrative grades differently than other types of grading. (See p. 42 of 2019 AMCAS Applicant Guide) AMCAS records the grades as NE with no explanation and does not forward the narrative eval documents to med schools along with the rest of the application. Students attending colleges that offer NEs have to contact each med school individually once their applications have been received and processed to make arrangements to have their narratives sent to the school.
^ Reed records traditional grades on a traditional transcript, but students never see their grades unless they ask, and the culture is generally not to ask. Students do see the narrative evaluations.
Brown does give out grades (A, B, C, …) but no plus or minus(this is bad…if you miss the cut-off for A, your grade drops to B, no A- or B+ to save you).
You can S/NC any classes… even in your major(concentration in Brown’s term) but you’ll need departmental approval in that extreme case. S/NC policy is to encourage students to explore non-major areas without worrying about grades.
Pre-health Office at Brown tells pre-med students must take the required pre-med courses in letter grade because AMCAS/med schools AdComms expect letter grade in those.
MIT does not cover grades from Spring semester of freshman year.
Thank you!!!. I knew that the parent had to wrong.
How on earth does this joke/rumor persist? Christ it was already tired and old over 10 years ago when I was applying.
Funny story though. My attending for outpatient medicine was a Brown alumnus who did in fact take all of his undergrad courses S/NC prior to going to Penn for med school. He also graduated in like 1974 and was one of the first classes to have all 4 years be the new curriculum. He did say some schools refused to consider his transcript complete even then. He fully acknowledges there’s no way you could get into med school that way now. Anytime we weren’t talking clinical medicine we were talking about Brown, lol.
So rumors of @iwannabe_Brown barely taking classes for credit 10 years ago are not really true then and it was only as of 1974. 
My gut told me that the parent had to be wrong, but was soooo persistent and acted like this was a new thing.
But I felt that I needed to check with the College Confidential experts before really correcting her.
She was actually pushing her Premed child to choose Brown simply because of her belief of such a policy. In her words, “Well it’s Brown so med schools will just accept based on that.” Lol
Totally fine to choose Brown, but don’t choose if for a reason that’s not true.
I thought that JHU discontinued this policy.
@mom2collegekids
feel free to send them this:
https://www.brown.edu/academics/college/advising/health-careers/faqs#snc
Imagine, is it possible that the highest GPA may not actually predict the best MD?
Sorry, I could not resist!
But it’s hard to differentiate when they all had that undergrad 4.0. I know, not all do.
Q: What do you call the person that finishes last in medical school?
A: Doctor
@skieurope: Have you seen this (2018 experimental grading policies exclusive to those entering in 2018) ? I can see why the idea that MIT covers freshmen for the whole year may have arisen:
@Waiting2exhale No, I had not seen. Thanks for the update.