<p>In answer to norcalguy, as you can see from the footnotes at the Berkeley website, the Berkeley numbers are what Berkeley receives from AMCAS and are basically a summation of the data about Berkeley premeds who apply to med-school and choose to have their information reported back to Berkeley. I am sure that some Berkeley applicants will specifically choose to have their data shielded from Berkeley ("cloaking"), although I doubt that this is a large number. After all, you don't gain anything by cloaking yourself. And furthermore, I am not aware of a good reason as to why Berkeley premeds would want to shield their data from Berkeley any more than, say, Cornell premeds would want to shield their data from Cornell. Hence, when you talk about comparing school to school, from a relative standpoint, I think it's a wash.</p>
<p>The admissions percentage data should also not be particularly affected by 'cloaked' premeds. I am not aware of a good reason as to why strong Berkeley premeds would want to disproportionately cloak themselves relative to the weak Berkeley premeds. If anything, I would think it's the other way around - it's the weak Berkeley premeds that might want to cloak themselves. And if that's true, then the true Berkeley admissions percentage is even worse than it appears. However, I concede that whether the cloaked premed applicants are worse than the average premed applicants is a matter of speculation. However, the point still stands that a surprisingly low percentage of Berkeley premed applicants who choose to report themselves back to Berkeley manage to get admitted to med-school, and I don't believe that the cloaking phenomenom is an explanatory factor. </p>
<p>Now as far as MIT is concerned - is 74% really a good number? Let's be perfectly honest. I think you would have to concede that MIT is probably a more prestigious and more selective school than Cornell. In fact, MIT is generally held to be on par with HYPSMC in terms of prestige and selectivity. And certainly the MIT curricula is at least as difficult as that at Cornell, and in fact, one could argue that MIT is, on average, the most difficult school in the country (along with Caltech). </p>
<p>Yet the fact is, many of MIT's peer schools exhibit significantly better admissions success. Take a gander at Princeton's premed data. Princeton's premeds score a admit rate of over 90%. The data is similar for Harvard and Yale (unfortunately Harvard and Yale are only available in hardcopy. The Princeton data is posted below). Yet the point is that an admit rate of ~90% is clearly better than 74%. </p>
<p><a href="http://web.princeton.edu/sites/hpa/2004.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://web.princeton.edu/sites/hpa/2004.pdf</a> </p>
<p>Not only is the admit rate at MIT significantly lower than that of those other schools I mentioned, but the GPA of those admitted is significantly higher. Again ,looking at the MIT data, you can see that the GPA of admitted MIT premeds is about 3.7/4. Yet, the average admitted Princeton premed had a GPA of somewhere between 3.4 and 3.5. Think about that. It is arguably as difficult to get admitted into Princeton as it is to get into MIT, and I think we would all agree that MIT tends to grade harder than Princeton, yet, Princeton premeds get in with LOWER grades than MIT premeds do. </p>
<p>So whether you think the MIT premed data is reasonable or not is, I suppose, in the eye of the beholder. What I can say is that I have presented the MIT and Princeton premed data to quite a few MIT premeds, and I can tell you that every single one of them became unhappy and agitated by what they saw.</p>