MIT has published admissions rates in the past to various grad programs (including law schools, which allegedly don’t care about “rigor”, just gpa) and I’ve been surprised that the numbers suggest that grad school adcom’s DO adjust for rigor. Kids with “low” gpa’s getting into law schools that they shouldn’t be getting into; kids with “below the bar” gpa’s getting into med schools, etc. Since ALL MIT students take the “core” of chem, bio, physics, math, etc. it shouldn’t be a surprise that a kid who is interested in medicine but is not a scientific genius might be doing quite respectably in the premed type classes but NOT acing out over the engineering types. Hence lower GPA’s, but med school adcom’s “adjusting” for the pace of learning, rigor, and competition in their classes.
I haven’t seen the tables for other colleges so i can’t comment-- but again, I think the “you can have a 4.0 in underwater basketweaving and waltz into med school” is tremendously overblown. At some point, MCAT scores and GPA converge. Kids who have not challenged themselves academically in college are going to score high on the MCAT’s exactly how? And kids who are doing underwater basketweaving are going to do well in orgo how? Especially sitting next to a kid who is gunning hard in a class which is curved?