<p>If I want to go pre-med, should I avoid applying to schools that are known for harsh grading such as Swarthmore, U Chicago, etc., or will the "name" balance out the coinciding lower GPA? Because I can get into a fairly well-respected school where I can excel, but I don't think I can get into a tip-top school where all you do is coast for As (ahem Harvard) and I do want to have an impressive transcript for med school. Do I go with prestige? Or is GPA more important to med schools? (my sister went to U Chicago, worked herself to the bone for a 3.5)</p>
<p>search for sakky's posts. yeah. Lots of past discussion on this, some quite heated.</p>
<p>Go to the best school where it isn't impossible to get good grades. Stanford (although easier to get good grades) gets the same or more credibility than Johns Hopkins when students apply to top schools. Avoid Cornell and JHU the most. Most of the Ivies (with the exception of Cornell) arent that bad.</p>
<p>slipper1234, you seem to have developed a hatred for Cornell/JHU. I think we need some facts/statistics to back up your generalization.</p>
<p>Its no hatred at all, they are great schools. I would add Chicago to the list. They are some of hardest grading schools in the country and some of the biggest weeders for pre-meds. I find myself telling people to apply to Cornell often, especially transfers. I just want to warn pre-meds.</p>
<p>vaib relax...all slipper is saying is that Cornell and JHU are both very difficult for premeds as there is a tough curve and an insane workload. That doesn't mean he hates them. It's just like when Alexandre knocks on Dartmouth.</p>
<p>Yeah, so many people go to JHU especially because they think it has a great med school, and thus a great "pre-med" program. Of the three pre-meds from my high school who went there, none of them are pursuing medicine anymore. I also have a few other friends who went there, and they all have expressed how difficult and cutthroat being pre-med there is. So basically perhaps 90% of JHU applicants get into med school, but a majority never even made it far along to apply.</p>
<p>Kate - I'm an MD, and my daughter is considering pre-med - here is what I think, for what it is worth
Don't pick a school based solely on some perception that it will help get you into med school. I would worry a little about the rigor of a few schools - Reed, Swarthmore and Chicago come to mind - but if you love the atmosphere, that is the place for you to go, and the grades will take care of themselves (I think Med school admissions cuts slack for some schools). I think that any school with huge numbers of pre-med frosh is not a good place, it by definition is going to be cutthroat - and JHU is the poster child, it is an excellent school, but is one place that I would have discouraged my daughter from going pre-med.</p>
<p>You have to remember that many people start out as pre-med and end up doing something else - it does not make them failures or "bad" people. Pre-med is competitive because it HAS to be - do YOU want to go to a doctor who is/was a slacker? Medicine, in general, controls quality by controlling the number of places in med school (competitive up front); law, on the other hand, has many schools with places for everyone who makes a reasonable score on the LSAT, but controls quality through the bar exam and placements during and after law school (competitive after the fact).</p>
<p>One of the best ways to judge the quality of the pre-med program is to ask questions about the "pre-med office", or whatever they call it at a particular school. What resources do they have to help you get the practical exposure to medicine you need to get into med school, or to decide it is not for you? What counseling and support do they offer to frosh and soph who are trying to decide yea or nay? How do they treat those kids? Do they give everyone opportunities to do soul searching? Not every good pre-med school is going to do all these things, but a great one will do most of them.
Great programs have very high med school admission rates because they weed out people who don't have the credentials or who don't really want/need to do medicine - but they don't weed them out purely through cutthroat grading or unbridled competition OR by just denying a recommendation as a senior - it is a process of helping the student make a good decision.</p>
<p>Schools with easier grading may help pre-meds if the med school admissions people do not take grading standards into account. However, to be fair, admissions people should take grading standards into account. To paraphrase the title of this post, "Do schools with easy grading standards hurt medicine? hurt higher education? hurt society?". I prefer to look at the question from a broader perspective.</p>
<p>But you look at the average GPAs for say Wash U Med or Harvard Med and they are all around 3.8 or thereabouts...so you gotta wonder how big those allowance that they make really are.</p>
<p>Class rank may offset GPA at a tough institution...assuming the rank is high! At some point you can't duck the fact that it is competitive - you have to be "better "than somebody else. There is a down side to that however as docs tend to be aggressive.</p>
<p>75% of MIt pre-meds get into any med school, with an avg. gpa of 3.7 (search sakky's threads for the exact numbers and website). I would say, the harsh grading schools will hurt you because med schools don't really care where you went, they want high gpa's, and mcat's (among other factors)</p>
<p>"75% of MIt pre-meds don't get into any med school"</p>
<p>Sorry dude! 75% of MIT pre-meds DO make it into Med school!!! Cornell has a 84% placement rate, and Brown has 81% placement rate! These are HUGE....there's a bunch of wrong information in the thread above.</p>
<p>To compare how high these numbers are, university-of-Michigan-ann-arbor only places about 60% into med school, and UC-Berkeley is about the same as michigan (I think)</p>
<p>I'd say go for one in the middle. Sacrifice some prestige for a better GPA. The only problem lies in the fact that if you do well, then you start to wonder if you would still be doing well in a much tougher institution. Maybe go a little more on the prestigous side of the scale...it depends how hard you want to work to get that pre-med degree. If you don't want to do the amount required, you'll probably drop out of the major if you're in a tough school. Well, most people don't want to do work, but you know what I mean...you have to be motivated enough to do the work, do it well, and understand it. Understanding it is key, it is much more than just memorizing something for the test. In the end, it all comes down to how much you want the degree.</p>
<p>where did u get the michigan 60% information from? golubb_u???</p>
<p>"where did u get the michigan 60% information from? golubb_u???"</p>
<p>Alexandre has a link to it somewhere here...</p>
<p>Interpret those numbers with a jaundiced eye. What you want to know but can not is the % who entered with hopes of going to med school that made it.....</p>