That is a philosophical debate. Data10 in any earlier post essentially said that at Harvard, everyone gets an A if they demonstrate “mastery” of the material. So there is no bell shaped curve for grades. And that is why their median GPA is so high. They are essentially playing by different rules.
Grade inflation is much more rampant and widespread than most of us realized. It even affects what commonly perceived to be the most rigorous schools with grade “deflation”. My son attends one such school. He never had an A- in any of the courses he took (many of them are graduate-level courses). He’s good, but not that good.
1 Like
I completely agree and have said so, but not in so many words, in earlier posts.
The focus on GPA made me think that medical schools want doctors who make very few mistakes, don’t need them to be creative and that raw talent as defined in other fields such as math or physics is a secondary or even lower consideration.
i.e., the resulting perfectionism is a feature and not a bug.
1 Like
Actually in my experience, physicians who are perfectionists are often the ones who make more mistakes because they refuse to acknowledge they were at fault and can’t learn from the experience. it’s a fine line. Perfectionist + humble = good. Perfectionist + arrogant = bad.
My concern is for the pre-med students who don’t get accepted into a med school, which is the majority.
College is a huge investment and every student should maximize their opportunities to learn as much as they can.
Medical schools encourage students to do the opposite in the effort to achieve the highest GPA possible. Pre-med students often:
- take less science, not more
- take the easy professor, not the difficult one
- take less credits, not more
- search out the easy GEs, not the ones that stretch them in a different field
- rely on test banks
- drop classes early when they sense it will be difficult
- chose not to get minors or concentrations
If the student gets into medical school, there’s less harm that they wasted opportunity as an undergrad, but for the majority who played that game and were still rejected, it’s an enormous waste of human talent and potential. It harms the student because they have made a large investment in time and money without getting the maximum benefit from their education.
3 Likes
Students are often not in a position to judge their own chances four years hence. The CC community is loathe for the family to influence any decision making by the student, but the family has a responsibility to see 4 years ahead and make sure the kid is making the correct decisions right now, as to whether they are being wise by being on the pre-med track. If the family (perhaps with the help of the high school science and counselling resources) feel that that medical school is not happening, or low odds, then a plan B has to be built into the program.
2 Likes
Typical companies do not emphasize new grads having the pinnacle of highest grades. Instead after the candidate passes a basic GPA threshold, they emphasize other criteria, ,particularly success doing something similar to the position in a work environment. For example, in the 2012 survey at https://chronicle-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/5/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf employers ranked the following criteria as most important in evaluating resumes of new grads for hiring decisions. Many individual employers differed. This ranking represents the average among hundreds.
- Internships – 23
- Employment During College – 21
- College Major – 13
- Volunteer Experience – 12
- Extracurricular Activities – 11
- Relevance of Course Work – 8
- College GPA – 8
- College Reputation – 5
The ranking above relates to choosing which candidates to interview. Among candidates who are interviewed, the interviews are often critical in hiring decisions. They may extend multiple days and have multiple stages, with an evaluation of both relevant technical skills and personal/company/team fit. Long and detailed interviews isn’t a new change primarily to combat grade inflation. Even without grade inflation, employers don’t necessarily assume that if a student received an A in an relevant course 3 years ago, the student remembers everything about that course today, and that knowledge will lead to be successful in a completely different environment that is more like a multi-year team project than doing well on a multiple choice midterm/final.
4 Likes
While the survey is accurate, it fails to note that internships and work experience during college are often the result of high gpas.
Also 2012 was before the shift to online recruiting and hiring screens, which are ubiquitous now.
1 Like
That’s exactly right. Before a student has gained some relevant work experience, grades, particularly in relevant courses, play a major role in initial screening.
1 Like
And to a significant extent, the top MBA programs build on this. For quite some time, the top programs rarely admitted students straight from undergrad. The quality of job experience (including the associated references) are a major factor in the admissions assessment. The top law schools are also trending in this direction. In my day, the vast majority of law students came straight from undergrad. The recent Harvard law school profile has 65% of students being 2 or more years out of undergrad.
I actually think that medical schools are requiring too many science classes/pre-requisites. The requirements have gone up over the years. One of the problems with taking so many pre-med requirements is that you don’t have much of a plan B if you don’t get into medical school.
Here are the requirements.
2 semesters Biology with lab
2 semesters Physics with lab
2 semesters General Chemistry with lab
2 semesters Organic Chemistry with lab
1 semester Biochemistry
2 semesters English
2 semesters Math (Calculus)
Some medical schools have additional requirements or recommended classes like: genetics, psychology, foreign language- Spanish, statistics, computer science, sociology, and microbiology.
IMO, it’s overkill.
Very little of what is learned in these college classes is of any use professionally.
1 Like
Medical school admissions is VERY much holistic. Take Stanford’s class of 75. They could easily fill multiples of that w 4.0/top MCAT from the best schools if they wanted. But, they don’t, just like they don’t for undergrad…
Although the cutoff, at least at my S’s HYPSM, was much lower than 3.9 for MBB or BB IB internships. Once you made the GPA hurdle, the other factors listed by Data plus the interviews were the determinative factors.
Can you define holistic? If your selection process includes a first pass where a hard cutoff solely based on a numerical value removes the vast majority of the applicants, that doesn’t sound very holistic to me.
All of this (with the exception of Organic and Bio which have prerequisites) can be easily taken during one’s first year of college with plenty of room for other courses. Easily.
1 Like
It makes sense for business schools and law schools to require candidates to have some relevant work experiences. However, that might be much more difficult for medical schools.
My point was that the cutoff, whatever it is, will likely increase with continuing grade inflation. At some point (when all candidates will have near 4.0 GPA, which isn’t far-fetched), that cutoff won’t be effective.
Moreover, I’d consider MBB and BB IB to be among those which have necessary resources. Vast majority of companies aren’t in that category.
Very few pre-meds take more than 1 science course (with lab) at a time. Your suggestion would not be easy at all. In fact, most people would consider it academic suicide.
This is Swarthmore’s Pre-Med Advising Notes.
- Overloading on Labs: One very common problem is that students are anxious to get their pre-med requirements “out of the way,” so they take too many lab courses at once and do poorly. Once this occurs, it becomes very difficult for them to attain the strong science foundation and high grade point average that are required to get into medical school. Only strong science students with good high school preparations should be encouraged to take more than one lab course per semester in their first year.
2 Likes
I am much less familiar with med school, but it does seem like many of my D’s and S’s classmates waited a year or two before applying to med school, often obtaining a masters in some relevant health science field, whereas most of my classmates who are doctors went straight to med school. But agree that grade inflation does muddy the waters as comparisons for limited spots is more difficult.
I’m not sure what could be left out, though. Each of those has relevance, and depending on the specialty some are more important than others. Physicians (hopefully) keep up on the research and those classes are often foundational for understanding the literature. Medicine is science even if the practice of medicine isn’t, if that makes sense.