“I agree that many on CC seem to exaggerate the stats required for and difficulty of acceptance to medical school.”
Well it’s really hard to get into med school, pre-med is still the toughest undergrad program because of the competition, sometimes cutthroat. If you survive the pre-med program, do well on the mcats and actually apply to med school, it’s probably easier to get in to med school than people think. But getting through can be brutal. As I mentioned, my dr. said 1800 kids entered the pre-med program at Berkeley when he went, 600 remained senior year. And of those 600, how many got into med school, who knows, but even if it’s 50%, you’re talking 300 out of the initial 1800. That kind of attrition is not there even in the toughest majors - aeronautical or nuclear engineering when I was in undergrad.
And while most majors have weed out courses, none has the reputation of Organic Chemistry, where professors are instructed to only give 10-15% As, 15% Bs and C’s and Ds for the rest. And if you get a C or D in Orgo, you’re done wrt med school. Yes there are fluff schools that give out As and Bs but that’s more the exception.
You mentioned Berkeley in your post. Berkeley publishes their grade distribution, and that grade distribution does not resemble the percentages you listed. Instead the median grades for OChem are in the B range for lecture (3B) and in the A range for OChem lab (3BL). Berkeley is known for harsher grading than the vast majority of selective privates and is certainly not a “fluff school”. For example, the most common grade at Berkeley’s neighbor’s (Stanford) organic chem class is an A, rather than a B. Which specific colleges did you have in mind that give 75% of students C’s or worse? Or were the percentages more of a guess?
We’ve discussed this before. There are some bad assumptions in the attrition rate estimate, such as assuming everyone who takes chemistry must be a pre-med. I took intro chemistry in my freshman year, even though I wasn’t pre-med (at the time). My advisor recommended intro chem for all engineering students, even though chem wasn’t a requirement for my planned EE major.
A more accurate metric would compare the number of students who express an interest in pre-med in a freshman survey to the number that actually apply to medical school. At many selective private colleges, the two do not show a huge attrition rate. For example, Yale’s freshman survey mentions “15 percent reported plans to pursue a career in medicine after Yale,” The AAMC reported Yale med school applicants / number of Yale grads is 14.5%. Some of those were repeat applicants, but the point is there does not appear to be a huge attrition gap between the portion who plan to pursue a career in medicine and the portion who apply to med school at Yale. Of course colleges that primarily admit less stellar and lower test scoring students are expected to have very different results. It’s also worthwhile to note that many students change majors and career plans during colleges for reasons other than being weeded out.
Pre-med is rarely a major. The pre-med requirements are primarily a group of intro underclassmen math/science classes. Students majoring in the field take similar intro classes, as well as higher level classes beyond the pre-med requirements. At the college I attended, pre-meds tended to take the easier version of these classes in an effort to protect their GPA, while engineering students or persons planning to major in the field often took more rigorous versions of the corresponding intro pre-med classes.
Fitting with the thread, I’d expect the pre-med attrition rate to differ significantly between races. URM preference in admission contributes to this trend, but is not the only factor. For example, the study at https://cshe.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/publications/rops-barr-premed-11-13.pdf compares changes in pre-med interest at Stanford and Berkeley. URMs have a sharper change in interest between freshman and sophomore year at Stanford (URM preference) than at Berkeley (no URM preference). At Berkeley, White students had a greater negative change in interest than did URMs, while at Stanford, Asian students seem nearly immune to loss of interest in pre-med. The author writes,
**In addition, the decline is seen among all racial/ethnic groups at Berkeley, while at Stanford the decline in interest among white and Asian students was less than that among African American, Latino, or Native American students.
…
In a typical year, a URM student who enters Stanford aspiring to become a physician is less than half as likely as a non-URM student eventually to apply to medical school. **
This doesn’t necessarily mean the URM pre-med student would be better off at a different college. One also needs to consider that selective private colleges with a larger portion of students doing A quality work, like Stanford, tend to give a larger portion of A grades. A particular URM pre-med student may be no more likely to get an A at a less selective college where most students are not as well prepared for the intro math/science pre-med classes as at Stanford and as such gives a smaller portion of students A grades,
“For example, Yale’s freshman survey mentions “15 percent reported plans to pursue a career in medicine after Yale,” The AAMC reported Yale med school applicants / number of Yale grads is 14.5%. Some of those were repeat applicants, but the point is there does not appear to be a huge attrition gap between the portion who plan to pursue a career in medicine and the portion who apply to med school at Yale.”
It’s interesting you bring up Yale, because I know factually that Yale has a weed out process for pre-med that is not well publicized, for obvious reasons. It’s about 40% and those 60% that make it get support for their pre-med applications. The other 40% switch majors, they don’t drop out of college I agree there. The 15% number that plan to pursue is right, the 14.5% is definitely not.
“Is that attrition? Sort of, but not because of difficult Chem classes.”
It’s definitely because of the Chem classes, see this:
From an ncbi study a few years back, this is the their abstract:
“Previous research has documented that negative experiences in chemistry courses are a major factor that discourages many students from continuing in premedical studies. This adverse impact affects women and students from under-represented minority (URM) groups disproportionately. To determine if chemistry courses have a similar effect at a large public university, we surveyed 1,036 students from three entering cohorts at the University of California, Berkeley… URM students especially often stated that chemistry courses caused them to abandon their hopes of becoming a physician. Consistent with reports over more than 50 years, it appears that undergraduate courses in chemistry have the effect of discouraging otherwise qualified students, as reflected in their admission to one of the most highly selective public universities in the US, from continuing in premedical studies, especially in the case of URM students. Reassessment of this role for chemistry courses may be overdue.”
That was a few years ago, now it’s possible that chem classes are graded easier as data10 points out, but without a doubt, it’s Chem classes that are the reason kids drop out of pre-med.
For UCB, here are some grade distributions, including for common pre-med courses. Looks closer to about a quarter A- or higher grades, not 15%, in those common pre-med courses (including Chemistry 3A and 3B, the organic chemistry course for pre-meds and biology majors).
From my personal experience, many do leave pre-med for the reasons I stated, and in my best-known case, she stayed with the hard major but chose not to be a doctor. Obviously YMMV.
[ quote=data10]At the college I attended, pre-meds tended to take the easier version of these classes in an effort to protect their GPA, while engineering students or persons planning to major in the field often took more rigorous versions of the corresponding intro pre-med classes. [ /quote]
This is very true. Of course to a nonSTEM person majoring in theater, taking chemistry can be grueling. But make no mistake, the physics, biology, and general chemistry courses are relatively straightforward, and many STEM majors will skip the premed versions and take the harder versions (especially physics).
The difficulty in being a premed is the large number of course requirements, which are not waived even if you are an advanced student coming in. You either have to take more advanced courses simply to make the arbitrary numbers or you retake courses for which you already know the material, wasting your time and wrecking the curve for everyone else.
I’m convinced that if medical schools didn’t require an arbitrary number of courses, but instead focused on specific competency requirements, premeds would have a less competitive existence in college, and medical schools would find themselves with more interesting, well rounded students who had used their undergraduate years more optimally.
Even with some medical schools moving toward competency based requirements, pre-meds still need to compete for top-end grades and GPA, since many medical schools do use an automated screen including high GPA before human application reading (the small number of 2.80-2.99 GPA admits to a few medical schools notwithstanding).
You can view the number of applicants from Yale at https://www.aamc.org/download/493728/data/factstablea2.pdf . Yale had 190 med school applicants in the 2018-19 cycle . NCES reports 1313 bachelor’s graduates. 190/1313 = 14.5%. As mentioned I am ignoring repeat applicants. However, only a small portion of Yale applicants are typically repeat applicants. For example, in the class of 2015, Yale reports 192 first time med school applicants and a 209 total including both first time and repeats. So the rate for first time applicants would be 192/1313 = 14.6% of the Yale class. Yale reports that 85% of these first time applicants were accepted.
Pre-med isn’t a major at Yale or at any other highly selective college I am aware of. Choosing to not apply to medical school does not mean you switched majors. From personal experience at Stanford, all pre-meds I knew who did not apply to med school continued with their major (usually Human Biology). All of these who I knew well enough to have a good sense of their grades had high enough grades that I expected they would have been accepted had they applied, but chose to purse other fields. For example, some pursued PhDs rather than MDs. One is now a tenured professor at Columbia.
The study I linked to in my post is by the same author and also found chemistry was more likely to be a discouraging course at Berkeley (and likely most other colleges) than other pre-med subjects. However, this does not discount anything listed in my post.
Of course, if a student with such a major does not get into medical school, a major like the above on his/her resume when applying for jobs (or other graduate or professional programs) makes it more obvious that s/he is a failed pre-med than some other major would.
At Purdue it’s not a major, it’s a concentration. “Academic goals such as pre-medicine, pre-dentistry, pre-physician assistant, etc., are career interests rather than majors or degree programs.” https://www.admissions.purdue.edu/majors/a-to-z/premedicine.php
At Notre Dame it’s not a major. “As an Arts and Letters pre-health supplementary major, you can pursue any other major in the College while acquiring the education, skills, and experience you need to get into—and succeed in—graduate school for medicine and other health professions.” https://al.nd.edu/academics/majors/arts-and-letter-pre-health/
This is also not a pre-med major: “The science preprofessional studies program prepares students for fields such as medicine, dentistry, osteopathy, veterinary medicine, optometry, podiatry, physical therapy, occupational therapy, public health, pharmacy and post-baccalaureate nursing. Students who complete this program will earn a Bachelor of Science in Preprofessional Studies.” https://preprofessional.nd.edu/preprofessional-major/
Apologies, yes pre-med is not a major, I knew that, but it was too early in the morning for me. I meant pre-med as a program of study, you would have to major in bio, chem, biochem, bme etc… I think you can major in anything as long as you fulfill the med school requirements.
There’s selection bias in the grade distribution because (afaik) they contain only students that stay in the course. Students who are failing drop out of the class before the end of the semester
During fall 2018, 539 students were enrolled at the start and 515 received final grades. Drop out rate was 4%. During spring 2017, 544 students were enrolled at the star and 529 received final grades. Drop out rate was 3%. 3-4% of kids dropping out is not going to have a huge impact on the listed median grade.
Also, not all students who drop the class do so because they are failing. Indeed, UCB’s drop deadline is relatively early in the semester, which may be before the first exam in many courses, so that students who drop may not know how well or poorly they are doing in the course before they drop.
My wife sent me this article this morning and it talks about something I have often seen coveted among the poorer students that I known who have attended elite universities. A “certain type” of low income student of any race but mainly underrepresented students that has attended good to great schools (prep schools and magnets come to mind) versus low income students who attend elite institutions from under-performing public high schools.
If you like my previous post on grading, you will love this one, @ChangeTheGame. Prof Anderson actually came out and say some majors exist for the purpose of giving As :
It has a lot to do with instrumentation. The SAT can be looked at as a proxy for learning aptitude, and GPA for conscientiousness. I have written and posted enough on grades so I will say a few words about the SAT.
As far as I can remember, the SAT has been modified a couple of times. A writing portion was added at one time, then the entire test was re-centred at another time. I don’t know anything about the new version so I will not comment on it, but the end result of those other adjustments made the test a lot less sensitive at the tails. I would be surprised if the new test is not also designed with that in mind.
This is clearly done for political reasons. Why else would you make the instrument less sensitive at a time when college admission is getting more competitive? Why add a second “verbal” portion and not a “quant” portion? To be fair, should the “quant” portion not be made harder to match the “verbal” portion so they show a similar score distribution? The math portion was simply too easy and too many students top out, so one can not tell the strong students from the exceptional. Who are they trying to help? Who are they hurting? Those are questions worth asking.
If adjustments to the above were made, I would expect the data would show much greater similarity between academic success and job success.
1995: Scores recentered, mostly affecting verbal, presumably to account for college going becoming less limited to the top students.
2004: Writing section added; it used to be an SAT II / Achievement test that some colleges found to be better predictive of college performance than the verbal (critical reading) and math sections.
2016: Newest redesign. Scores slightly higher.
Yes, the SAT is less sensitive at the tails (and that was true before 1995), but the tails are not where the biggest part of the college admissions testing market is. The College Board wants the SAT to be centered where the bulk of test takers are. And that means math based on high school algebra 1 and 2 and geometry, which most late 11th and early 12th grade students have finished. “Elite” students are only a tiny part of the testing market and therefore not the main focus.
Concordance tables exist for the 1995 and 2016 changes.
@Canuckguy I agree with that sentence but will add learning aptitude at that particular moment in time for the standardized testing. With the GPA, ones conscientiousness can grow with maturity so it measures ones conscientiousness over the entire 4 years (if grade inflation wasn’t a thing), versus ones actual conscientiousness at that moment.
I have always thought that the standardized testing system was corrupt because you could take the test 10 times to get the score you want and if a kid scored 20 points less and took it once, the 1st students score is better. I think that they should allow at most 2 shots and I am okay with 1 shot for all of the marbles, but the goal of the system is to make money (off of prep materials, multiple testing, testing prep, etc) so that will never ever happen. So with my family, we just play the game as it is and try to beat the system at the same time (we prep our own kids, use free materials, and shoot for an one and done testing scenario).
The author of your article was really honest about what I consider to be the biggest change in education over the course of my lifetime. With the ability to rate professors on line, and the journey for every student (and parent) in the world expecting all A’s, the satisfaction of a mediocre grade in a tough class has pretty much become a thing of the past. My son’s lowest grade in his life came in the teacher’s class that he loved the most. I still remember studying with him one night for hours until he knew everything that the next test was on. When my son got that test back, he got a low B and it was because the teacher wanted the kids to think further than just rote memory (this was a Biology class) but to connect dots that went further than any high school biology book. That is happening less and less because many are afraid of how they will be affected by a mediocre grade and they are definitely not embracing the challenge. At the time, I was not happy with his grade, but that course made him up his “game” as a student and I am very thankful for that teacher. So I disagree with the author’s assessment that one doesn’t learn much when receiving a C only because that can depend on the person and the class. The author is right that the admissions arms race (to get into Medical School, Law School, etc.) is playing a part in the grade inflation dynamic (I put some blame on grade grubbing by students/parents for some of the high school grade inflation as I see it all of the time with my wife being a teacher). But grade inflation sure makes it harder to distinguish between students on paper.