Good thing your son did not follow that someone’s advice, 'cause I think that someone is wrong. Not doing additional year of chemistry leaves the applicant rely entirely on AP credit to meet the inorganic chemistry requirement. That doesn’t sit well with a lot of schools. Even though biochem is not strictly inorganic chemistry, the common advice folks with AP chemistry credit used to get from pre-health advisors is to take it as the “second year” of chemistry. My kid got the same advice and followed it. Also, most schools are changing that advice in view of MCAT 2015. Biochemistry is now a required course in itself. The rule is that you can’t count the same course towards multiple requirements. Hence, my son’s school (JHU) now advises kids with AP chemistry to take two higher level inorganic chemistry courses.</p>
Different schools have their different set of especially challenging classes. Sometimes the difficulty level for the same subject is different depending on who teaches it. DS once told us that another student did very well in almost every prereq class but was burned by orgo I. When orgo II came, he/she almost never stopped studying orgo II while awake in order to remedy the situation. He/she did get A in orgo II and got into a top-10 med school. He/she was also a student who got BS/MS in 4 years. (Not a single student in that graduating class had 4.0 anyway. The difference between those with very high GPA and those with not so high GPA is how many non-As he got and when he did not get A, did he get A-, B+, B, B-, or even lower? When the average is around A-, it is good enough in general, and the battleground is then moved to the EC area if he/she is a grade efficient premed who will not spend too much time on enhancing her good enough GPA, I think.</p>
<p>Orgo has to be studied non-stop in order to get an A. it is just a fact, it was fo my D. She mentioned that each exam (not only finals) required at least 30 hours of prep. D. had a great habit of going over material in her head while doing something elase. She used to write HS papers in her head during her sport practices and then just type them quickly next day. She was going over Orgo material while walking from class to class, Yuo have to. She got her A. It was a huge contast to Gen. Chem, very easy class (at least the one that she took)</p>
<p>Everyone seems to think orgo is terrifying! I actually enjoyed it, especially orgo 2. I skipped gen chem, as well. I took the SL IB chemistry course at my high school, but since colleges don’t give credit for that, I took the AP test and got a 5 on it. I didn’t have any problem with the material in orgo, even though I took the AP test my junior year of high school and didn’t take orgo until my sophomore year of college. Orgo isn’t always an evil class!</p>
<p>also depends on the school. Many have orgo for non chem major, some do not. Some teach orgo as pure memorization, some do not. When it came time for the MCAT, I thought the orgo was a joke in comparison and the level of mastery needed to ace MCAT orgo would not have earned above a C in the classes I took.</p>
<p>And of course, some people are just good at it. I knew several kids getting As in orgo, some worked hard, others worked very little (e.g. my hall mate who “studied” by clicking through all the lecture slides at a rate of one slide every second)</p>
<p>I would never say it’s always an evil class but if I’m going to put my money down on which class any random pre-med is going to struggle with, I’m putting it on orgo 100 times out of 100.</p>
<p>Mcat2,
of course at Brown we don’t have +/- so this whole “is it an A-, is it a B+, B, or B-” is foreign to me ;)</p>
<p>^"-" meant a lot at D’s school. They gave “+” also but they meant nothing, literally zilch. 3 “A-” lowered D’s GPA to 3.98 (all were in singing classes of Music minor, she had no prior vocal coaching and many did). Few more would have put her below Summa Cim Laude cut of 3.96 in her department. It did not mean much at the end, but graduating Summa and having it on your diploma is a nice icing on the cake, that she fully deserved.</p>
<p>^I am glad that D. did not go to your school, just kidding…I guess, no Phi Betta Kapa either? No medals at graduation? It was all very nice to see, added something special…</p>
<p>we do have PBK but nothing is awarded at commencement - also no speakers other than students at commencement.</p>
<p>Since we don’t have distribution requirements, PBK is a bit “controversial” since in order to get it, you have to fulfill their distribution requirements. For humanities students it’s pretty easy, but for science students, typically if one is not gunning for PBK (i.e. picking classes to ensure you meet the distribution requirements) it will be impossible to get it.</p>
<p>I’ve been playing around and withholding some relevant info. We do have honors within your concentration (every concentration has different requirements for what that means) and magna cum laude (GPA in the top 20% of the class - no stratification by concentration or anything like that) and both are noted in the commencement program. The departmental ceremonies which follow the school wide commencement are where we receive our diplomas and might make some mention of your accolades based on the size of the department. For example at the biology department ceremony (~300 graduates), they said my name and that i had an ScB in biology, but at the classics department ceremony (~20 graduates) they had us fill out a little questionnaire beforehand so they went into a lot more detail about each student (where they were from, high school, activities at Brown, plans for the next year) - including those of us who were double concentrators and attended a different ceremony.</p>
<p>Brown’s commencement is very much community focused and the highlight of the event is really the processional featuring all faculty, alumni, and graduating students present.</p>