If you control for other measures that are considered in the college application, including HS grades + HS course rigor, the additional predictive ability for college grades added by SAT/ACT scores beyond these metrics becomes quite small, often to the point of being negligible – adding very little to the prediction beyond these non-score metrics. This contributes to why the overall cumulative GPAs of bates students had little difference between test submitters admits and test optional admits. They are admitting relatively lower scoring kids who have good HS grades + course rigor + LORs + essays + … rather than just average lower scoring kids who don’t excel in these other metrics.
What we know is a test with average or median of 40 is not designed so anybody at the median gets an A-. Then you might as well just do a more conventional average of 75-80, if all you’re doing is giving mostly As and Bs anyway. And you have to consider the context, it’s ochem, where that kind of average is pretty common. Giving a B to someone that gets 70% of the test wrong is not happening, even at schools where everybody gets As and Bs. These professors take themselves seriously in that class, maybe too seriously sure, as I said they think they’re weeding out potentially bad doctors. I had a couple of tests here and there with an average of 40 and depending on the distribution of course, usually you needed an 80 to get A-.
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That competitive environment can continue in medical school.
I’m guessing you haven’t attended a college where the overwhelming majority get A’s and B’s. What you describe is extremely common in a class with hard curve, which are numerous among large intro underclasmen STEM classes. For example, earlier in the thread, I mentioned I had an intro chem class at Stanford where median score grades were in the 30-40% range. As I recall that 30-40% median grade corresponded to a B+/A- type grade. The professor seemed to really like talking about the unique grade distribution on his challenging exams, with graphs, listing SD figures, and highlighting the few kids out of >100 who managed to be extreme outliers with >70% scores, yet the final grade distribution was still like other Stanford classes.
The final grade distribution was also similar in the following year where a different professor gave exams, with median grades of near 90%. The median exam grades were completely different between the 2 professors, yet the final grade distribution of the classes were similar and both in the usual range for Stanford.
Some professors like to give challenging exams that go far beyond just regurgitating words/concepts from the textbook. This doesn’t mean they don’t still give the overwhelming majority of students A + B grades, like typical other professors at the school. One of the primary benefits of using a curve is it allows professors to maintain their desired % A/B while still being able to make exams how ever challenging they’d like, rather than being stuck in the usual HS school grading scale of 90-100% = A, 80-90% =B, forcing them to use easy exam questions that near everyone can answer. The curve can keep the resulting %A/B the same, regardless of exam difficulty.
PCP definitely. ER is somewhat dependent upon the unit. In well off low acuity areas you’re getting broken arms from bike accidents. In areas with poor coverage you see trauma, a kid getting into someone’s drugs with neurological devastation, etc. but far more common: someone rolling in with a cold or something best handled by a PCP…because they don’t have a PCP. During my wife’s residency (at a well known peds hospital), it was the latter. She told an attending she wanted to do ER. He told her, “you like the hard stuff. You don’t have patience for the people coming in with sore throats. And where does the hard stuff go?” ER doesn’t treat over any duration. It mostly discharges. Rarely it tries to save. For things it can or other sticky situations, it pushes to surgery then ICU or sends straight to the ICU.
Major medical center, everything bad within 100 mile radius stuff…it’s not boring, but people on a message board don’t wanna know.
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Most colleges with large number of pre-med students have some weed-out courses in STEM. They’re needed to perform the function admission offices were unable to do. Many more pre-med students change their career directions because of these courses than because of MCAT results.
My earlier post mentioned that studies suggest that SAT/ACT score adds little to the prediction of grades beyond the other measures that the test optional (and test submitter) admits are selected on including grades, course rigor, LORs, essays, ECs/awards, etc. If true, then it follows that one would not expect large differences in grades between submitters and non-submitters among the so called “weed-out courses”, just as there was no significant difference in overall GPA between submitters and non-sumbmitters in the Bates study, among numerous others. If average GPAs are similar and average MCAT scores are not similar, then the MCAT is more likely to explain differences in med school outcomes between the 2 groups than grades.
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GPAs, especially ones that average again over a large number of students, are poor indicators as they don’t tell anything about the underlying courses. It’s the same rational that colleges (other than those that have too many applicants) prefer to use applicants’ specific course grades rather than use their GPAs.
Not sure what that has to do with anything outside of oozing condescension. Just because a college gives out Cs doesn’t mean somehow they have worse students than a place that only gives out As and Bs. This would mean that a place with tougher grading like Princeton has worse students than a place with let’s say, fluffier grading.
Large intro classes can also happen in smaller private universities with big lecture halls of 4-500 students and smaller sections for problem sets, where you could definitely have a hard curve. Maybe not Ds and Fs, but certainly a lot of Cs.
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Your original claim that I quoted and replied to in the post was the following. My comments related to this claim, which is explained in the areas of the post you skipped over. They relate to curves increasing a low % score on an exam to a high A/B grade, not whether Princeton has worse students that a college with “fluffier grading” or which types of colleges have large intro classes.
Giving a B to someone that gets 70% of the test wrong is not happening, even at schools where everybody gets As and Bs
This implies that curves that give a particular % of the class A/Bs do not exist. My point was that I doubt that this claim is based on personal experience, or other evidence. The reality is that many classes use curves, particularly large intro STEM classes, including at colleges where the vast majority of students get A/B grades . When using a curve, a low % score on exam can result in a high A/B grade. This makes it inaccurate to assume a particular low % on an exam will never be an A/B, without knowing how the exam is curved and how that particular score fits in with that the curve. In general, a median exam score is probably going to corresponds to a grade similar to the typical median grade for that course. So if the median score on a particular exam is a low %, and it’s at a college that typically gives the overwhelming portion of students A/B grades, then that low % median exam grade is probably going to be curved to an A/B grade.
You mentioned Princeton. One of the key reasons why they have lower grades than HYS peers is because they attempted a policy that limited A grades to 35% of students several years ago, which is very similar to a curve type system. If you read the reports on why the policy failed miserably, some professors used this style of a curve on a class by class basis, so regardless of what % correct on the exam, top 35% = A. If the top 35% cutoff is a 50% exam score, then a 50% is going to be an A under that professor.
There was a news story a few years ago about a class at JHU that was curved to make a score of 0% on the final = A (see https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/12/students-boycott-final-challenge-professors-grading-policy-and-get ). The professor was using a unique type of curve that made the top scoring kid in the class get an A, regardless of how low his score was. So the all the students in the class refused to come in the room to take the exam, resulting in the maximum grade of 0% = A, so 100% of the class gets A’s. He gave the full class A’s in spite of nobody scoring above 0% on the exam. Had the maximum grade been 30% instead of 0%, 30% would have been an A.
Like Chemistry, Organic Chemistry and more chemistry. 
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Pay off for a prestigious school is not necessarily towards income but more so as enriched experiences, increased confidence, more career options, better social currency ,more successful friends/parter options etc.
It has even more value for students coming from poverty, no network, needing financial aid, exposure to better networking/dating/recruitment options, etc. They get a bigger boost in many ways.
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Interesting. As I have posted previously, I had the exact opposite experience. I thought that my Ivy undergrad degree made me somehow smarter and better prepared than all my med school classmates who had attended what I (at the time) considered to be inferior schools. I quickly learned that my classmates’ alma maters were excellent proxies for parental SES rather than their own intelligence. Even a generation ago, the bar for admission to med school was so high that we were all very bright and well prepared regardless of what college or uni we came from.
I have found medicine to be an egalitarian meritocracy at every step of the way, from med school to residency to fellowship to practice. No one cared about my Ivy undergrad. They cared about how I performed under pressure at 3 am.
Based on my experience and that of all my friends and colleagues in medicine, I don’t think the prestige and bells and whistles of an Ivy or Ivy-equivalent are ‘worth’ the ROI for my own high-stats college-bound kids. My graduating senior will be attending a lower-ranked school on a full merit scholarship with all her 529$ saved for grad school. (We were willing to spend more than that, but the full tuition school was the best fit for several other reasons unrelated to the unbeatable price tag).
However, I won’t presume to tell anyone else how to spend their kids’ college money, other than it’s clear that taking on large amounts of debt for undergrad is very unwise in most circumstances. But if you’ve got the cash to pay for >300K for undergrad and think that that’s the best use for your money? Go for it. But then please don’t imply to those of us making other choices that we are somehow selling our kids short.
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I think we’re generalizing too much based on our own (or our kids’) experiences. My S attends one of those most “prestigious” and certainly one of the most challenging colleges. Based on what he’s done so far, I’m convinced that he wouldn’t be as challenged and able to do what he’s done at almost any other college. That was the reason he chose that college. But I wouldn’t presume his path is the right one for many other kids. What type of colleges a student should attend is a very individual decision.
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Because you went to med school with the top-tier students from other schools. If you had to stay in those schools for 4 years, you might have gotten bored to death.
My S went to our state flagship for one year. He took general chemistry, organic chem, genetics and scored close to 100 almost every exam and the class avg. was like 50-60. He couldn’t talk to many students there because not many students there were interested in academic stuff. He did lots of other stuff, but still was so bored and decided to transfer out.
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How bored was he in high school? Most high schools have a wider and lower range of student academic ability and motivation than most colleges, and are also smaller than most colleges, so the cohort of top performing students is likely to be smaller than at a college like a huge state flagship.
…and it helps a lot to enroll in an honors college/program at a large state U.
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HS experience can really depend upon underlying HS SES and how courses are tracked though. My HS had 400 kids/class. 15 per class were on an all honors/AP curriculum. You would have classes with that 15 + 15 or so similar kids a class above/below you + a pool of 30 kids from your class depending upon their strengths/interests (social sciences/STEM/language/lit). The only classes outside of that were a semester of health, 2 semesters of gym, 2 years of language and electives like art/music/yearbook/newspaper. It was very much a school within a school. The “weakest” kids in those classes were still probably a 1 in 4 kid at a middle of the road state flagship.
This school wasn’t ultra competitive. Maybe a bottom of the top third/top of the middle third mid to upper middle class HS. There were another 150 kids/class that went to our state flagships from outside that track. I played sports with them and was social with many others, but there wasn’t really an academic connection there.
The difference between my HS and large public universities is that I would have been taking classes at the U with students similar to my HS where there was no academic connection. Honors colleges definitely help though.
He was in honors college, but our state is small, so the state flagship is not quite up to UVA or UC level.
He actually wasn’t bored at all in HS; he was in a selective STEM program of a large school district. There are usually about 10 kids in the program qualifies for AIME. He and another kid were the only qualifier in the state for USAPHO his senior year. This program sends about 4-6 kids to HYPSM every year, around 8-12 to T10.
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Agree—this speaks to the non-monetary payoff that a college with a high concentration of highly intelligent and similar academic-minded students can provide the very bright students. I have seen it over and over. Sometimes their tiered highschool cohorts make it hard for them to know that picking a school such as the average state school is not going to have the same feel at all—they need these kinds of kids around them to be the most satisfied and successful. Being bored out of your mind and not stimulated by the majority of your peers is not typically a recipe for success. Glad he was able to transfer.
We have a gifted/magnet HS near here which churns out dozens of NMSF every year, and the average SAT is around 95th%ile. Due to the competitive nature of college acceptance at the schools with the highest concentration of similar kids, the middle of the pack kids at this HS commonly do not get into the #1 or #2 state flagship. So. They end up at the lesser ranked schools where they are bored and transfer out after a year, or just make do. It really can be a detrimental experience if you are that far above your peers intellectually.
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