<p>How would you react to the seemingly depressed gpa at UC Davis for someone interested in pursuing premed there? Typical average gpas for bio/chem courses are 2.5, with 8-9% A and 5-6% A-. This makes UC Berkeley a ridculously grade inflated school. Even if this is due to a less competitive student body, wouldn't it be harder(less margin of error) to stay at the top 8-9% compared to say top 15% at UC Berkeley?</p>
<p>Call up UC Davis and ask for one of these charts:</p>
<p>The only way to determine whether a 3.6 is harder to achieve at school X vs. school Y is to compare them to a standard (the MCAT).</p>
<p>Let's look at Cornell:</p>
<p>It's grade inflated (average GPA in the 3.3 range). But, there is very good evidence that it's still a pretty tough school. 95 out of 267 med school applicants scored over a 35 (which is 95th percentile nationally) while only 29 had 3.9+ GPA's. This means a lot of low GPA students at Cornell are scoring high on the MCAT. Nationally, a 3.6-3.7 GPA equates to a 30 MCAT. But, with Cornell, you can see that the median GPA for the 3.4-3.6 group is still well above a 30. The median MCAT of the 3.2-3.4 group is above a 30. Heck, the median MCAT of the 2.6-3.2 GPA people is still a 30. So, you can reasonably conclude that Cornell is tougher than your average school for premed.</p>
<p>Because the schools with grade inflation tend to have stronger students while schools with grade deflation tend to have weaker students (with a few exceptions), there's no way to guess whether those factors balances out without a MCAT/GPA chart.</p>
<p>We do know, however, that in law school applicants, the factors don't balance out -- such that schools like Cornell are much harder than schools like Berkeley, which are harder than other state schools like Davis.</p>
<p>bdm, I'm not sure I follow your assertion completely.
I agree that Cornell is harder(though not much harder) than Berkeley since they have similar average GPAs(about 3.3) and Berkeley probably has a larger percentage of weaker students. But Davis has average GPA of only 2.9. I'm not sure that if you send all the Davis students over to Berkeley, their GPA will drop to 2.6, especially in the usual majors/courses infested by pre-law students.</p>
<p>A few of us here at CC actually did out the math, using LSAT scores and GPAs. Let me see if I can dig up the standardized measures we had. Be back in a minute.</p>
<p>My apologies! It turns out UC Davis is one of the schools that we are missing data for.</p>
<p>1.) As a general trend, my assertion was correct. More selective schools do give out higher GPAs, but that higher GPA is vastly outweighed by their greater selectivity. The same student body would, on average, earn a much lower GPA at a more selective institution. The "hardest" schools, as calculated numerically, are not state schools, but places like MIT, Penn, and -- yes -- Harvard.</p>
<p>2.) There are exceptions, however. Notice UC Irvine is deeply "deflated" on the list of schools (see below) -- more so than Princeton, Williams, and even the University of Chicago.</p>
<p>3.) Davis might be one of the exceptions! We didn't have the raw data available to calculate it, so it is not safe for me to extrapolate it too far.</p>
<p>4.) Just to repeat, these numbers are from students applying to law schools. Sadly the AAMC doesn't publish the medical school numbers.</p>
<p>5.) Methodology: the LSAC publishes mean LSAT scores and GPAs among pre-law students. This allowed us to calculate a "corrected mean GPA" for each school -- that is, if you correct for academic talent as measured by the LSAT, what would the mean GPA be? We then standardized this total around the mean, so that the output is a "z-score" -- that is, it's so-many standard deviations below average. For example, MIT is 2.64 standard deviations harder than the Tufts, which is about the national average. (Some schools are listed twice because multiple years were included.)</p>
<p>Results and Methodology in posts 29 and 30 here:
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/law-school/266240-question-about-top-law-schools.html#post3365648%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/law-school/266240-question-about-top-law-schools.html#post3365648</a></p>
<p>Wow, my guess about Cornell(-0.686136) being a little harder than Berkeley(-0.646136) is pretty good. Nice work bdm.</p>