<p>After having checked on mdapplicants, I have noticed that people from texas public schools who got accepted (UT austin, Texas A&M, Texas Tech) consistently have a higher GPA (usually from 3.85 to 3.99) and very high MCATs (33-37) compared to other students who got accepted to the same medical schools (most students who got accepted from Duke, vanderbilt and other private institutions got 3.4 to 3.8 GPA and MCAT is slightly above 30)</p>
<p>I thought that maybe, medical schools "require" stellar GPAs and MCATs (compared to the average matriculant) from students from texas public schools. Is it right?
Or is there a kind of discrimination against public schools?
Does medical school "expect" a higher GPA for students from texas public schools (do you need a GPA higher than 3.95 to impress admission offices)?
BDM once made a thread that there was an inequity in GPA&MCAT (he used MIT and Duke as examples), so I wondered if it is the same for public vs private (reknowned) schools.
Any comments/facts/statistics/insights are welcome, Thanks!</p>
<p>Your first mistake was trying to draw any kind of conclusion from mdapplicants.</p>
<p>Well, the average GPA might be higher at the Texas schools because the program isn't as difficult as schools like Duke, where the average GPA for pre-med students is lower...</p>
<p>just speculating...</p>
<p>I think what's more likely is that you're seeing that schools are helping their students in ways that aren't instantly obvious. So, hypothetically, an Austin kid with very poor advising is going to do worse than a same-numbers Duke kid with very good advising. The difference, however, isn't (necessarily) the difference in prestige, it's a difference in support structures.</p>
<p>That's not to say that prestige doesn't matter, or that there isn't a public/private gap -- only that we can't prove one exists.</p>
<p>So is it due to the good advising at Duke that you know so much about medical school (although I bet you learnt a lot more by being a medical student), or did you have to figure out all by yourself when you were there?</p>
<p>It's due to really, really good advising.</p>