<p>From when I visited Northwestern, I remember seeing that medical school acceptance rates were around (maybe slightly over) 80%. This is much better than the overall acceptance rate into med school, but it's a little low compare to other schools on a similar level to Northwestern. Schools like Wash U and Emory have acceptance rates of over 90%. I was wondering why Northwestern's was lower. Is this because they don't weed out and encourage applying, or because they grade very toughly?</p>
<p>Some of the schools that say they have 90%+ wouldn't write recommendation or make it obvious that they would write a mediocre recommendation (what do you expect me to say???) to discourage weaker applicants from applying. There was an article on that about JHU. I thought I read that WashU's % was like 84%; are you sure they both got 90% anyway? MIT's rate was like 77% in one of the recent years and Cornell's rate has been around 77-80% in the past few years. So Northwestern's rate is pretty comparable to its peers.</p>
<p>MIT and Cornell are notorious for grade deflation though. Do premed courses at Northwestern suffer from similar grade deflation?</p>
<p>Sam Lee, where exactly did you read that about JHU? I believe JHU students have cleared up that myth, but if you don't mind posting the article up, that would be great.</p>
<p>JackJackson,</p>
<p>It is puzzling to me how Cornell can be "notorious" for grade "deflation" when it actually has grade inflation (average of 3.34 which is equivalent to a solid B+)!
<a href="http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/10436%5B/url%5D">http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/10436</a>
It's not as inflated as Harvard/Duke/Stanford (around 3.4/3.5) but it's definitely not deflated in my book. </p>
<p>KRabble88,
<a href="http://www.jhunewsletter.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/03/21/3e7a3fbeb5814?in_archive=1%5B/url%5D">http://www.jhunewsletter.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/03/21/3e7a3fbeb5814?in_archive=1</a>
To me, it's a half-myth in the sense that they don't actually bar marginal students from applying but they do actively discourage them.</p>