And how exactly do they weed students out?
The short answer is that all college courses are weed-out courses for pre-meds. Any grade lower than an A is a ding against your chances of earning a GPA that will get past medical schools’ initial GPA screens.
However, biology, chemistry, physics, and math courses are even more important than other courses to earn A grades in, since a separate science GPA is considered. These include many of the usually required or expected pre-med courses like general chemistry, organic chemistry, biology, physics, calculus, statistics, and upper level biochemistry.
Weeded-out pre-meds may be perfectly capable of succeeding and graduating college, even though they may have no realistic chance of getting into medical school.
Weed-out classes exist everywhere (college) and popular majors (CS, engineering, architecture…), not just pre-med. For example, computer science is a popular major and so any CS intro class(es) can serve as weed-out.
In general, the purpose of weed-out classes is to “reduce” the # of students to a certain level by course difficulty and harsh grading. For example, organic chem (orgo) is a typical pre-med weed-out class that can be made extremely hard, but Bio 101 or Gen Chem 101 can serve as first line of weed-out.
It’s estimated that approx. 75% of freshman pre-med hopefuls have been weeded out by the end of junior year.
College science class grades are curved so that only a fraction of the class earns grades of A or A-. (For example, a fairly typical grade distribution curve limits A and A- grades to the top 15% of the class. . )
Is the student at fault for not pulling out when the grades became irreparable? Or is the professor partially at fault for their harsh methods?
Grades are the students responsibility. I don’t care how bad/harsh the prof is, it’s up to the student to get extra help/tutoring and then to understand their own limitations. I guarantee that no matter how harsh the class, there are still students managing to earn As.
Does it matter? Nobody from admissions to employers will be interested in “bad teacher” as an excuse.
^^Exactly!
Plus every withdrawal is a ding against you in med school admissions.
I’ll give you a concrete example. I taught the physics course for premeds at Berkeley for a year. It’s a huge course, like 200-250 students per lecture section and at the time I think there were 2 or 3 lecture sections per semester. We were only allowed by the university to give a certain percentage of As and Bs… I think it was something like 15% As. Now… can someone get into med school with a B or C in physics? Probably. But multiply that by several other similar courses like organic chemistry and realize that med school admissions are pretty competitive.
So let’s say I was a crappy professor (I probably was… I was new at it and not very entertaining in front of a large crowd). Still, 15% of the students got As from me, just like if they’d taken the course from one of the more experienced professors. And to be honest, I think most of us teaching or TAing the class wouldn’t want anyone as a doctor who couldn’t get at least a B in that class anyway.
ps - here’s a tip - you want to know who did well in that class? It was the kids who came to office hours.
More recently, UCB Physics 8A and 8B (physics for biology majors and pre-meds) tend to have grades with 28% A- or better. See the following thread for more: