Maybe you need to try to enjoy your college experience and stop tearing your hair out right now and you’ll perform better…Also, depends on the public school. I hate to be blunt, but many public school science courses can be as hard if not more difficult than some top private counterparts (I know we like to think we’re special, but in many cases we aren’t. Usually the introductory courses…sure, but many Vandy instructors for say organic…differ none from what I saw at UGA, if anything the UGA tests I saw were flat out harder. Gen. chem was comparable yet they throw like 500-1000 students in an auditorium with a balcony to “learn” the material), especially if you speak of like a flagship (like my UGA example). Often upperlevel courses are much more consistent than at a private school where you may run into the lazy research oriented instructor who’d rather just water down their course than deal with students who expect high grades. The fact is, unless the public school is struggling to have a decent graduation rate, then many intermediate and advanced instructors have no incentive to make things easier. In addition, if you run into difficult instructors at a public school, the lecture hall will be even larger and it will be even more isolating.
There is also the issue that Vandy and schools like it are more likely to offer “well-taught” intermediates or upperlevels that are better prep. for the MCAT. This will ultimately make studying for the MCAT easier because you not only know the content (because in these better classes, you were taught more and deeper content), but you also know it in more challenging “contexts”. Remember the MCAT is passage/case/scenario based. The more your courses build a skill to handle that sort of thing the better because it is hard to reteach yourself the content and how to think about it like they want to on the MCAT. The MCAT problems will no doubt “deviate” from your Kaplan or Princeton review books…private schools prep you for this well. Also, again, Vandy’s classes are normal sized for medium sized private schools. Generally, say Duke, JHU, Harvard, etc. have similar sized sections for intro. and intermediate pre-med science courses. The schools with smaller and differently taught ones include Duke (changed their biology to be flipped a couple of years ago), Rice (lots of things going on here), Chicago(math and many other things are a bit different), Emory (chemistry is flipped and biology is not pure lecture), WashU (chemistry), and maybe Harvard (if you consider Life sciences 1a), MIT (TEAL option for physics) but with those exceptions, the decent sized lecture reigns supreme at medium-sized and large privates. Public schools, especially the prestigious ones, and many flagships are actually a step ahead in this arena.
If you are really concerned with the science education there, as opposed to just your grades, maybe consider a public school that is known to do it well (I like Michigan, UMD College Park, and some others…lots of money and effort has gone into their science curricula to make it more rigorous, problem solving oriented, and less lecture based) and is migrating away from lecture for several of its pre-med oriented science classes. There are many that you should be able to find…but don’t simply find one that is merely easier because you may pay in terms of quality and while you may be “more motivated” to study for the MCAT, you will be less capable of getting the most out of that studying. Consider this. If you cannot get yourself in a position to be sucessful on an in class science midterm at Vanderbilt, what exactly makes you think the MCAT will be easier? Better to keep trying and change your strategies so that you can get to that level now than riding high on the confidence you get from having a very high GPA at an easy school and then getting slammed down by your MCAT score. This type of thing happens all of the time even among students who took an ACT/SAT well.
Also, your issue with freshman science class labs is not new. It honestly sounds like you are overall disappointed with undergraduate science education…the issues you cite are not new to any school. Some just try harder (like getting money) to make changes on a larger scale and sometimes those attempts to change fail (like Duke taking until maybe last year or a year ago to implement its “research based” general chemistry. It tried it in 2006 and bombed and now the current version is only a shadow of the original 2006 plan with lecture still being the primary method of delivery. Biology went much better EXCEPT that last I checked the gen. biol there gave all multiple choice exams with the questions being intensive and convoluted…at that point short answer is appropriate). Change in STEM education is really hard. Keep in mind that your instructors “learned” via these modes so assume that current students do as well and thus mimic what their instructors did. In addition, changing delivery methods is risky because they would have to switch to more active learning which often gets resistance from students (and thus results in lower evals). The students may learn more, but they don’t like it because it requires more effort.
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