<p>I heard that professors at University of Chicago rarely give out A's, and students' GPAs are affected.</p>
<p>How does this affect students' chance of getting into great grad schools/med schools?</p>
<p>Chicago is in the top</a> 10 for PhD production, so clearly it's not a big handicap. I read somewhere that ~80% of Chicago graduates eventually go on to earn a terminal degree (so many that Chicago is known as the "teacher of teachers").</p>
<p>Some professors rarely give out A's. Some are much more generous. </p>
<p>My impression of graduate school admissions is that most of the GPA considerations, once you're past a certain threshold, come out in the wash. What I mean by that is that a non-excellent grade or two amidst a sea of challenging, meaningful, relevant activities probably won't make a difference. If you just play the GPA game though, and expect to get into a great law or med school, think again. (And that is true at any college).</p>
<p>For academic graduate programs in particular, writing samples and teacher recs are fantastically important. Chicago students excel in these areas.</p>
<p>How hard is it to earn a 3.5+ GPA at Chicago? I am in full I.B. Diploma program and I don't plan to use any of my credits. I wanna learn everything all over again. My current predicted grades are 41/45.</p>
<p>I also took AP Biology, Calculus, and Chinese and Culture in my junior year and got 5/5 on all of them. I just went into the test centre without studying (just to see where I was in terms of my math, biology, and Calculus levels).</p>
<p>It can definitely be done. But, if grad school is your goal, one can't attend a much better school fot that purpose. Top grad programs of all kinds love U of C students.</p>
<p>I think there's an important distinction between PhD programs and professional schools. The University of Chicago is well respected at both, but pure GPA is much less important at the former than the latter (especially medicine and law).</p>
<p>Of course, it's not clear at all that GPAs at Chicago are meaningfully lower than at most of the competition. There's a lot of urban myth around grade inflation/deflation. I notice that grade inflation is something that always seems to be happening at some college other than one's own. Based on last year's Chicago Convocation program, newmassdad calculated that at least 60% of the graduating class had a cumulative GPA of 3.3 or higher, so it seems reasonable to assume that a meaningful percentage of the class was above 3.5.</p>
<p>FB - just anecdotally, here are my thoughts:</p>
<p>U of C has SUPERB placement for graduate programs (PhD programs) and business schools. Everyone I knew going on to B-School seemed to be going to a top 5 or top 10 school (with heavy representation at Harvard, Chicago, and Wharton). Same for the PhD programs - everyone seemed to be pursuing a doctorate at a top 5 program. </p>
<p>U of C placement for med and law used to be unspectacular, but I think it's getting a lot better. I started a thread on law placement earlier in this forum. I think as the avg Chicago GPA creeps up and students at the U of C become more traditionally pre-professional, stats will only become better on this front. Tentatively, and from my thread before, I think Chicago's placement probably matches places like UPenn, Northwestern, or Cornell. Not quite top flight, but not bad.</p>
<p>I've posted this before, but here are some law placement statistics from some of Chicago's peer schools, and Chicago probably does about as well in law placement (WHEN ADJUSTED FOR SIZE DIFFERENCES). </p>
<p>Cornell: <a href="http://www.career.cornell.edu/downloads/Law/PrelawGuide_2008kg.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.career.cornell.edu/downloads/Law/PrelawGuide_2008kg.pdf</a></p>
<p>(Scroll down to the last page for placement stats)</p>
<p>UPenn: Career</a> Services, University of Pennsylvania</p>
<p>Note again, both these schools are bigger than Chicago, and have around 500-600 law applicants a year. Chicago probably has about 300-350 law applicants a year, so Chicago's numbers are probably around 50-60% of these schools' numbers. So, if Cornell sends, say, 16 students a year to Columbia Law School, Chicago would send around 7 or 8. Unfortunately, Chicago doesn't have its placement stats available online, but I think it's safe to assume that Chicago probably performs roughly as well as some of its peer schools.</p>
<p>Final point - note that UPenn's mean LSAT for seniors at 164.2 is quite high, and Penn may place a bit better than Chicago and Cornell on the Law front. I'd imagine Chicago's senior LSAT avg. is closer to Cornell's - maybe around 162 or so.</p>
<p>But I heard many schools (especially law schools I heard) disregard which undergrad school you attend and instead just focus on your GPA. Is this true?</p>
<p>This is true to an extent. GPA is very important in the law school admissions game, but law schools still recognize the rigor present at certain undergrads (MIT, Chicago, Swarthmore, etc.). So applicants from these undergrads get a bit of a boost when compared to applicants from other places.</p>
<p>At the same time, FB lalaland, keep in mind what other have said, the "GPA Deflation" at Chicago is now LARGELY A MYTH. Chicago may not have the rampant gpa inflation seen at schools like Harvard, but completely gone are the days where Chicago students struggled to reach a 3.0 GPA. As said before, I'd say a good proportion of the class has a GPA of 3.5+, and the MAJORITY of students have a 3.3+ GPA. </p>
<p>Look at the mean numbers from the two schools that provided statistics (Cornell and Penn). The mean GPA is around a 3.3-3.4, and the mean LSAT is around a 162. Chicago's scores would be right around those numbers. </p>
<p>Again, to reiterate, the issue of grade deflation is a MYTH now at Chicago. In days past, grade deflation may have been the case. Now, deflation does NOT OCCUR. The avg. GPA at Chicago probably mirrors the performance of students at most of Chicago's peer schools (Penn, Cornell, Northwestern, Columbia, etc.).</p>
<p>I read Chicago is number two in the country for overall grad school acceptance rates, with number one being Johns Hopkins. Can't remember where I read this though....</p>
<p>^^ I think that's for grad school attendance rates, not acceptance rates.</p>
<p>It skipped over Hopkins again which had been number one. They trade places from year-to-year in the university affiliated colleges category. A few LACs like Oberlin and Reed still do better. </p>
<p>But anyhow, the statistic is the proportion of each graduating class that goes onto graduate study within five years (for UChicago about 85%). It is a terribly biased number though, since it is greatly influenced by how many students a school eventually graduates (e.g. Chicago has between 10-15% four year attrition), the quality of work students can find with their UG degree, the number who majored in fields where graduate study is an absolute requisite to finding substantive work (e.g. physics), and the proclivity of students in the bottom half of a class to accept spots at less than stellar graduate schools (e.g. a PhD in Anthropology at a SUNY). On all of these measures, Chicago veers in the direction that would favor further studies.</p>
<p>uchicagoalum - is Chicago's four year attrition rate still at around 15%? It was when I was there, but I'd imagine that number has dropped of late. </p>
<p>Also, the U of C definitely produces many ivory tower academics, but with the bottom half of the class now sporting stronger overall academic abilities and with "grade deflation" vanishing at Chicago, do you think many U of C kids interested in academia still take spots at subpar graduate schools? Even the future-PhD kids who graduated a few years after me all seemed to gain entry to superb grad schools. For example, I know Chicago produces more than its fair share of, say, Anthropology PhD students, but all the anthro students I know who wanted grad school ended up going to Berkeley, Chicago, Stanford, etc. </p>
<p>Of late, I'd be surprised if Chicago still fed students to lesser grad schools with as much frequency. Modern Chicago students seem a bit savvier about their options, more pre-professional, and also, as a group, just more accomplished than my counterparts and I who graduated around 10 years ago.</p>
<p>It'll be a hard choice for me if I am accepted by U of C that's for sure. I worry that I may not able to get high GPA at U of C. At the same time, I know that Chicago kids have gone to excellent grad schools, so it'll definitely hard for me to decide.</p>
<p>Where else are you considering? Generally, you should choose whatever school "fits" the best for you. If you're happier, you'll probably perform better in your classes. If you really like Chicago's vibe and atmosphere, the grades will come. I wound up doing fine at Chicago back when there was grade deflation, and I think my own happiness with where I was played a big role in my performance. I just wouldn't have been as content in say, Ithaca NY or in the south in Durham, NC.</p>
<p>Well I might get Major Entrance Scholarship to University of British Columbia ($10,000 a year renewable for four years - by the way, tuition, student fees, books only cost $9,000 in total, so I get $1,000 a year by going to UBC lol). </p>
<p>I am also considering Cornell University (I might get Guaranteed Transfer conditionally - with GPA 3.5+ for first year in certain required courses), so I need excellent grades in first year (I really want 4.0).</p>
<p>Other schools include, UC Berkeley, University of Toronto, U of Waterloo (prestigious Co-op program at Microsoft or Apple), Stanford University, Duke University, Brown University, HYP, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, Washington U, and Northwestern. My top choices are University of Chicago (for its Core), Brown University (for its Open Curriculum), Cornell (for its Agriculture and Life Science), Dartmouth (for its freedom), Stanford (for its freedom), HYP (for their freedom). </p>
<p>I only apply for reach schools because I already have guaranteed admission to University of British Columbia, which is a nice university, also highly prestigious.</p>
<p>We have to remember that the graduate school figure includes ALL grad schools, NOT JUST PhD programs. (There's a separate metric for PhD programs which I used to have bookmarked and now just leads to the Swarthmore College homepage). </p>
<p>Anyway, grad programs come in all shapes and sizes, and they're not really an indicator of anything. For example, a bunch of the fields I'm considering after graduation require graduate work, but it's more of a professional qualification than anything else, and some of the degrees aren't worth the paper the diploma was printed on (okay, exaggerration, but one of my family members went through a diploma-mill program for a professional qualification and said as much).</p>
<p>As I've said before, I think one would be hard-pressed to find a school that has the same depth and breadth of academic offerings that Chicago has, as well as the number of professors and their relative accessibility, due to a smaller undergraduate college. This is one of the schools greatest strengths, and that's just on the institutional level. </p>
<p>The other big advantage, I think, is the classroom experience, in that students here have academics as a priority. At my high school, most of the kids in the honors program went on to schools similarly ranked to Chicago, so I thought I was going to have more of the same from high school, but I found Chicago kids to be on another level of dedication and interest. From personal and anecdotal experience, you will get treated to as many academic opportunities as your stomach can tolerate. So I've not been surprised when my friends were accepted to top PhD programs-- they might not have had 4.0s, but they did have the academic preparation and a proven track record of challenge and success.</p>
<p>What time do U of C kids usually sleep? (I just wanna see how much work students there have. XD)</p>
<p>S gets 8-9 hours a night. He says he is generally able to get his school work done between 9-5, leaving him with time to socialize with housemates in the evening. 5th week was pretty crazy, he said, and he had two big assignments due last Monday (right after two exams), but he still went to the Folk Festival on Sunday afternoon. He is involved with a couple of campus activities and taking four courses, two of which are very tough and the other two work/reading intensive.</p>
<p>He said sometimes he takes a nap in the afternoon before starting on his HW. He did this in HS, too, as he got up VERY early to catch the bus for a long commute.</p>