I know of one company that interviews even longer, and that’s just for the ones that get hired.
If you consider all the ones that don’t get hired, you might be talking 40+ hours of interviews per summer internship offer.
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If schools like Harvard are participating in massive grade inflation, with median graduating GPAs in the range of 3.9, I don’t see how other schools further down on the food chain can hope to compete without following suit. They are only hurting themselves tremendously and their own students if they don’t.
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Well, isn’t the real problem that medical school admissions are largely GPA based, with little consideration of rigor or grade inflation?
For example, it can be much more difficult to for the same student to get a 3.5 GPA at some state flagships than to get a 3.7+ GPA at Harvard.
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No doubt. But GPA cutoffs are probably not isolated to medical school admissions. I believe other professional graduate schools like law school and business school are the same.
It’s quite ironic that undergraduate institutions tout the value of “holistic admissions.” But once a student enters college, that method of evaluation is thrown out the window by their own graduate schools.
When I was in college, there was a publication that reported interviews with professors (and I think students) about courses so you could decide what courses to take. The professor for freshman physics course, which I took, explained his grading philosophy in one sentence: “This is not a course in which we give a D student a C.” I’m guessing that premed students avoided this class like the plague.
If I’m not mistaken, Princeton had taken a stand against grade inflation and students complained that it was reducing their chances of getting into medical and law schools. There was no evidence that it actually reduced their chances as it widely publicized the , but Princeton relented about 10 years later, I think.
I think in the comments and articles that came out since the original article, we can see two things:
- This is complicated as Jones did not change his teaching or grading philosophy with the times or the student body, which have changed substantially.
- The incident is a litmus test for different political viewpoints that mostly don’t want to see the complexity.
Finally, my advice to kids bright but not brilliant kids who want to go to med school has been: If you want to maximize your chances of getting into med school, go to a school where you could be at the top of your class in the premed courses and study like hell for the standardized test. However, the practice of medicine is becoming quite different than it was and if you are not sure that your goal is med school, you may want to attend a school where you will find your intellectual peers.
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Yes, companies with significant resources are able to conduct long probing interviews and/or proprietary tests. They tend to be in businesses that are highly competitive and where human capital is the most critical. The vast majority of companies, however, are unlikely to have the necessary resources to do the same now or in the future.
Even if the company has the necessary resources, how is it going to narrow down the list of new college graduates who apply for a position if everyone of them has perfect or near perfect grades? Medical schools at least still have standardized MCAT scores.
Not sure about professional schools, but interviews with potential advisors in highly competitive doctoral programs are now practically required. Not getting an interview is synonymous with an denial for an applicant, unlike in the old days.
I think they also require interviews. It’s just that you need to get through the GPA/standardized test cut first before they even consider you for an interview. My guess is that the cut removes the majority of applicants from their pool.
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That may still be the case now. However, grade inflation, like the other inflation, once started, is extremely difficult to control and stop. The GPA filter may not be effective at some point.
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It’s also quite ironic that grade inflation seems to be the most pervasive among the top US universities. Logically, one would expect that the students attending those schools would need that kind of benefit the least.
I don’t think professional grad schools really care. I think that beyond a certain GPA and test score, it’s quite obvious the applicant can do the work and succeed. Having a higher GPA and test score doesn’t necessarily translate into getting a better candidate. These professional grad schools set extremely tough standards because they can, because they have to if they want to easily winnow their pile of applications, and because it helps improve their reputation to say that they only take the “best.”
Once you pass a certain GPA threshold, they consider course rigor more important than GPA.
There are numerous instances of near 4.0 GPA students not even getting the first interview while lower GPA students who have taken courses known to be hard, and done well in them, get called in.
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I agree with that.
But how? How do they “easily winnow their pile of applicants”?
It’s easy. Throw out any applications that are below your minimum threshold. In the case of Johns Hopkins, it could be that the computer throws out any applicant with GPA < 3.85 and an MCAT score <99th percentile.
This is different from how PhD admissions happen. Because the hiring is done by individual profs, and the prof needs to raise 500k for every PhD candidate he/she takes in. And the prof is committing funding for the candidate for 5 years. So the vetting is not casual. There is no concept of being able to do the work.
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That still requires knowledge and resources (to be able to differentiate the levels of rigor in various courses in different schools). My point is that vast majority of companies don’t have such resources.
I was only referring to professional graduate schools like medicine, law and business. I understand PhD programs have a different process. I have no idea what it is.
They can’t do that if every one of their applicants (or at least a vast majority of them) has a 4.0 GPA, which is where we’re heading to.
The companies that care, care a lot. They know which profs teach which courses at what university etc. What the curriculum is. How is the curriculum for the same course different at CMU vs Princeton etc.
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Even with grade inflation, you just adjust your filter even higher. GPA =4.0 and MCAT score = 100th percentile. 
I know what you are trying to say, but that rewards perfectionism, not ability. And I contend perfectionism is not a good trait for selecting a doctor.
For the same reason, I dislike the US grading system where you need 90 to get an A-, 94+ to get an A, etc. Personally, I think all exams should have an average score of 50, and let the distribution determine the grade cutoffs.
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