Harvard: “In recent years, Harvard students were admitted to medical school with equal or lower GPAs than national applicants. In a typical year, the admissions rate for Harvard applicants is in the range of 85 to 90%, and approximately 92-95% of applicants with GPAs above 3.5 are admitted.” chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://cdn-careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/161/2022/08/Applying-to-Medical-School.pdf And this for a school with reputed grade inflation.
The MCAT scores of UC and Harvard applicants may on average be higher, but this success rate suggests it is not a simple GPA/MCAT formula cutoff for all.
I see that. But I’ve been told by medical students that the university you attend doesn’t make a difference. It’s not easy for a U Chicago student to get a 3.6+ GPA, so I wonder if that is a selection bias why there is an 80% acceptance rate. U Chicago doesn’t tell you what % of their pre-meds actually drop out and don’t apply to medical school.
I’m not sure about Harvard. But a lot of Ivy Schools have a reputation for significant grade inflation. Brown for example is reputed to have an average GPA 3.7 for its graduates. Assuming that is true, that would mean 50% of Brown students would get through the first cut of the medical school application process if they had adequate matching MCAT scores.
Yes, the irony is that it DOES matter where you go, but that the best place is NOT where parents and students think students should go based on the USNWR rankings of “best” schools.
Students serious about becoming doctors should avoid schools that will place them in 350 person O-Chem “weeder” classes (with or without professors that students have been raising concerns about for years.) NYU costs $85/yr now.! Students with the stats to get into NYU have the stats to get huge merit at small lesser known schools where they will be treated well instead of like weeds.
To the extent that UC has grade deflation and therefore a high success rate at 3.6 means med schools are making a grading rigor judgement.
Harvard seems to be the example of prestige mattering. The 3.5 cutoff they use seems particularly low if you believe Harvard has grade inflation. The 85-90% acceptance rate regardless of GPA is twice the national average. Not saying there isn’t some selection bias as to students that are steered away from applying, but these are pretty significant differences.
You can never trust what numbers a school puts out. Some require a committee letter for you to apply to medical schools, and if the committee doesn’t think you will get in, you don’t get a letter, and you can’t apply. Guess what - now the school can brag about high acceptance rates. Most students do a gap year and only the very top will try to get in directly from undergraduate. So are the schools only counting those? Because if you’re a 4.0, 95% MCAT score with all the extracurriculars, you’ll likely get in and apply, but for most students, there’s something that’s missing (haven’t had time to take the MCAT yet because it was difficult to fit in the prerequisite classes), lacking hundreds of hours of direct patient care, etc., so schools don’t track those students because they are applying 1-3 years after graduation.
But, generally, the same schools with high medical school acceptance rates are also sending more kids to medical school. If more kids are being accepted and a higher rate of kids are being accepted, it seems that going to certain undergrad institutions could be advantageous.
But I also support the premise that some universities are gaming the system to make it look like their admission rates look better than they are. I mean, there’s no way a university would ever do something underhanded like that, right?
Maybe, the benefit of attending a prestige university is somewhere in between?
That’s my guess, given that prestige universities may have an incentive to discourage from applying those who probably won’t get admitted to med school. But at the same the percentage of students who probably will get admitted (and are thus not discouraged) seems much larger.
For these NYU students who were struggling in Jones’ class, it sounds like they didn’t have the time available to succeed in his class for whatever reason (family obligations, lack of interest), which means they also probably don’t have the time for the other extracurriculars (50 or so hours of physician shadowing, 100+ hours of direct patient care, 100+ hours of community volunteering, leadership, research). They will likely need at least 1 gap year. After that, they could have a compelling personal story. If the GPA and MCAT are there.
That class definitely made things a lot harder for them. It all depends on how strong the student is in the other classes and which medical schools are being targeted. I doubt whether a “D” or an “F” grade can be successfully overcome. A “C” or a “W” are maybes, but it’s going to take a lot of work.
Along that point, this is in no way my area of expertise, but I am under the impression that historically, there have been significant disparities in the diagnosis, treatment, and pain assessment of non-white patients (particularly African-American patients). In other words, non-white patients have sometimes not gotten good care. I don’t know if those disparities stem from the ways in which medical students are selected by med school admissions offices or the way that they are trained or a combination of the two, but I do think that a good doctor-patient relationship needs to be built on trust and those sorts of disparities are worsened when doctors don’t trust their patients, or don’t really know the communities in which they are working or when patients don’t feel heard/seen by their doctors.
The best doctors with whom I’ve worked have been smart, empathetic and humble. The worst have been those who are overly confident in their intellectual abilities to the point of arrogance. Is a strong grade in organic chemistry a good predictor of who might make a good doctor? No idea. There doesn’t even seem to be consensus on this thread. But I am willing to believe organic chemistry is an important course for premed students given it is an admissions requirement and prerequisite for other classes. However, does that mean that it should be a crucial weed-out tool in medical school admissions? Going back to my earlier post, such courses may be counter-productive if getting a poor grade in one organic chemistry class becomes an immediate disqualification to med school admissions. And it could mean that some students who have the potential to become good doctors get weeded out of their chance at medical school at age 18 or 19 [ an age when let’s be frank, a lot of young people flail sometimes not because they aren’t intelligent but because they lack the maturity (frontal lobe???) that might develop a year or two later].
So I would hope that a medical school admissions offices would seriously consider a student who decides to retake the class another semester or over the summer. Yes, maybe their final GPA is a little lower than their competitors, but so what as long as they do master the material on their second shot? After all an aspiring lawyer can take the bar multiple times. Not passing it the first time is not a sign that they can’t be an effective lawyer. I don’t think performance in any single “high stakes” course or single sitting of an exam should be considered as an indicator of a student’s potential to succeed in their chosen field.
Is this a chicken and egg thing? Is a weed-out class designed to be harder than necessary to weed out students, or does the course material naturally weed out students because it’s difficult to master?
I don’t think 2500-3000 university chemistry departments collude with med schools to do their dirty work. I think the material is difficult, it requires a lot of study time, and not everyone will do well in the class. It’s always been hard, and it is a course that always had students who struggle, fail, or drop out.
If there is any change in the status quo (and I’m not saying there should be), it should be the medical schools that change how they evaluate applicants. The chemistry departments and professors shouldn’t be expected to change the course content or expectations to make things easier for premed students to get an A
In reality, it’s suggested at my school that pre-meds go somewhere where they are in the Top 25% (or even Top 10%) for grades and scores. This not only sets them up well to be able to succeed in college, but also med school acceptance, and good aid (need based or merit). It’s almost always a winning bit of advice.
The student still needs to do their part to succeed.
Students who are in the Top 25% at essentially any school can be successful at top schools if they’ve done their part. If lower than Top 25% it often doesn’t go well. I suspect many get discouraged when they encounter peers who have had a better foundation than they have. It makes them feel like they’re subpar even if they aren’t.
Schools that claim great med school acceptance rates often limit who can apply, so be wary of that “100% acceptance” claim. A marginal candidate could be accepted somewhere, but not if they’re disqualified from applying because they might mess up school acceptance rates.
I think medical schools all know there are a lot of good applicants who would make good physicians. There are just too many applicants and not enough spots. If there is not enough resources to sift through every individual application for “diamonds in the rough” and a computer is used to quickly cut out applicants who don’t meet the school’s minimum, that “worthy” applicant who overcame misfortune in organic chemistry is out of luck. Medical school admissions just like undergraduate admissions is also a PR game. There is no advantage from their perspective to accept applicants with a “lower academic profile.” For many applicants, the take home message is that you have to learn to play the game better.
Agree that the data is incomplete for any type of authoritative analysis. But when overall admissions rates for certain schools across all applicants are so much higher for some schools, there is something to that. The Harvard OCS has estimated that, ultimately, 17% of a given class will apply to medical school. That’s about 290 applicants from each class, so it is not a highly narrowed sample. But don’t disagree that students to these elite schools are more likely better test takers, have access to better counseling, recommendations and the extras that make a difference in the application, so we can’t just look at overall admissions rates.
Top 20 medical schools with highest MCAT scores
School Average GPA Average MCAT/MCAT Percentile
JHU 3.95 522/99%
NYU 3.92 522/99%
Penn 3.94 522/99%
Mayo 3.94 521/98%
Yale 3.93 521/98%
Columbia 3.93 521/98%
Vanderbilt 3.95 521/98%
WUSTL 3.87 520.3/98%
Northwestern 3.9 520/97%
Mayo 3.92 520/97%
Harvard 3.9 519.46/96%
Chicago 3.87 519/96%
Duke 3.9 519/96%
Mt Sinai 3.81 519/96%
Cornell 3.91 519/96%
Virginia 3.86 518.58/96%
Stanford 3.89 518/95%
Case West 3.78 518/95%
Baylor 3.92 518/95%
Texas 3.87 517/94%
At least among the top US medical schools, the academic standards are so high that there doesn’t appear to be much room for laggards, even those originating from top universities.
