I know this topic might cause some debate but why don’t graduate schools take undergrad rigor into account? I just finished my summer semester taking science courses at a different institution than my own because it was cheaper and more convenient. For the sake of this post, I won’t say which schools I attended, but my normal school is a top 10 public school (school A) and the one I went to for summer (school B) is ranked much higher (~hundreds) and is much easier to get into. I took multiple sciences at both and school A was significantly more difficult, was not as forgiving with the curve, and offered relatively no extra credit. I just finished chem 2 at school B, which is an extremely difficult course, but it was significantly easier, required way less studying, and gave so much extra credit I received over a 100 in the course. I am not saying school B is not a great institution that produces brilliant students, but when it is much easier to get good grades, why do grad schools not notice this and take that into account. I took other courses outside the sciences at both schools and school B was much less work to get a good grade. I have 0 regrets choosing school A because I love it and am learning a lot, but I know I would have a better gpa had I chosen school B.
I dont mean to sound cocky or arrogant in any way or act like I am better than anyone attending any college. I just want to know why people always say it does not matter where you go to undergrad because I believe it should.
Are you referring to medical schools ? If so, the committee letter of recommendation might address the fact that a hard course was taken at a less challenging school.
Need specifics with respect to graduate degree & discipline.
For law & medical school, the equalizer tends to be the LSAT & MCAT. GRE does not usually have as much direct correlation to graduate program.
@Publisher Really anything graduate program or job I guess. Nothing specific. For all intents and purposes, we can focus on med school.
@20177588 : Actually everyone knows the rigor of schools are very different. Using your A(difficult) school and B(easy) school as an example, there are several situations:
School A: A grade — this proves you can handle the rigor of difficult school. If you can get an A at A school but go to B school instead, it would take 10 times more efforts to convince AOs or anyone that your “A” at school B means you learn something.
School A: B grade — people know you can’t handle the rigor of difficult school. You might be able to hide your weakness at B school.
School B: A grade — it would take 10 times more efforts to convince AOs or anyone that your “A” means you learn something. But if you can’t get an A at A school, this is your best option since you can hide your weakness.
School B: B grade — people all know you are bad.
I ** DO** believe everyone takes the name of the school into account and with the same grade, students from A school win.
There are some differences in how medical schools treat different college graduates. If you apply to a state school and come from a top school, your college prestige may be reflected in a very small percentage of the overall score. Someone from a NJ state told me once it could be as low as 1 point on a 100 point scale. However, if you check the admission process in a top ten medical school like Michigan, you will see that most of their interview slots are taken over by other top schools.
Unfortunately, many medical schools are not as open with their admission processes. The best way to check which medical schools value your school in their admission processes is through your premed office statistics.
@texaspg : Do you happen to know more schools which put out data like Univ of Michigan med school? Thanks very much. The data above is very helpful and confirms that indeed the prestige of school does matter. Those from “other” schools really have to do something extraordinary to make up for the lack of prestige of their schools. That put them at a disadvantage. Also, schools like Berkeley which have a huge cohort of premed, for diversity reason, only a few are called for interviews from each school so they are at a disadvantage.
@nrtlax33 That makes sense… so basically someone from B school needs to do exceptionally well on like the MCAT to prove their gpa means something?
Pretige only matters when med school looking at two applicants with “identical” stats (GPA, MCAT). If you are the med school admission committee, which one would you pick between one from Ivy and one from a state univ with same GPA/MCAT? and which one would you pick between one from Ivy with low GPA/MCAT and one from state univ with high GPA/MCAT? pretty obvious, right?
@20177588 : This chart (https://www.aamc.org/download/321508/data/factstablea23.pdf) is the most important chart everyone should read before choosing a premed school. Now the most difficult problem is how to choose the most prestigious school which is affordable and you can fall between 1st standard deviation and 2nd standard deviation above the mean. If you are above 2nd standard deviation and you are not at a “good” school. You are at the wrong place.
Those from B school are really at a disadvantage without some great research/summer program/etc. Nowadays, everyone is doing some “research”. The prestige of the place where you do research/summer program/etc. becomes a factor too. Just like if you have a Google summer internship, you are more likely to find a good job after graduation.
I would think there is some correlation between “prestige” and the quality of the pre-med education that will help in both GPA and MCAT scores, having better prepared you for medical school at top graduate colleges. For example, I have a close friend who was Yale undergrad and Yale medical school. He has told me that the Yale undergrad education helped him get into Yale medical school as his undergrad course load was quite rigorous, many classes taught by faculty who are tops in their field, and an exceptional peer group of students. Let’s not kid ourselves that ug prestige isn’t important when applying to graduate school.
Yes the UM chart is revealing, note that the 8th college on the list was Wayne State, not a household name but I am sure they had some 4.0/high MCAT scores graduate from there, not a single one got an interview (at least as far as I can tell from the data).
What really would be useful for this discussion is if applicant, interviewee, and admit GPA and MCAT ranges were published by undergraduate school. Without that, it is not obvious whether “prestige” schools are actually favored in admissions, or if they just happen to have already selected the strongest students in terms of earning high grades in courses (GPA) and high test scores (MCAT).
The chart shows no such thing. Of the 567 interviewees, 342 are from the listed schools, leaving 225 from unlisted schools. Wayne State applicants may be among the 225; the only implication is that the number of such interviewees is under 9 (the lowest number for any listed school).
@ucbalumnus ummmm, that is why I have in parentheses (at least as far as I can tell)
You can conclude that they had 0-9, and I’m betting on the lower end.
@cu123 - UM is required to admit a certain percentage instate. They can be choosy in the selection of the students in state but based on the number of their own graduates being interviewed/admitted, they are still ranking their own school ahead of other Michigan schools in the selection process.
@nrtlax33
https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/86042/factstablea2.html
The race based on charts above are close enough an indicator to determine how many students are applying from a school. Most applicants to med schools are self selective and have an idea about their chances of success. So you have to look at the numbers of students actually applying from a specific school to see which school has more students feeling comfortable in applying. UCLA had lot more applicants than UCB (not sure about school size difference) at 926 vs 741. However, Johns Hopkins with about 1400 students each year has 400 applicants.
So much misinformation in this thread.
For med school, the MCAT is the great equalizer when considering applicants from many different schools.
Adcomms want to see a great GPA (regardless of what school it’s from) reinforced by a great MCAT score. Good GPA + good MCAT only keeps you from being disqualified from consideration. A poor MCAT will disqualify you. A poor GPA, whether it’s from Harvard or directional Poduck U, will also disqualify you. Applicants from high prestige schools are generally not advantaged in med school applications just by the name of the school on their diploma.
Please look at p. 14 of this document. It is an annual survey of med school admission officers and how they rank various factors when weighing applicant interview and acceptance information. https://www.aamc.org/download/462316/data/mcatguide.pdf
For medical schools, prestige of undergrad is among the least important factors considered. Sure if you have 2 identical candidates, it might make a difference, but no two med school applicants are ever identical.
n=1
You do know that undergrad pre-req coursework doesn’t directly prepare anyone for MCAT success. The overlap between course content and MCAT content is not congruent. Furthermore content knowledge is just one part of what’s tested on the MCAT. The MCAT is primarily a test of analytic thinking and idea synthesis, not knowledge regurgitation. Even students at Harvard complain that their pre-med classes do adequately NOT prepare them for the MCAT. See: [Premeds in Search of MCAT Prep Say Harvard Classes Provide Insufficient Instruction](Premeds in Search of MCAT Prep Say Harvard Classes Provide Insufficient Instruction | News | The Harvard Crimson)
Again this is not true. The vast majority of successful med school applicants each year do NOT have some fancy summer program credentials. Research experience is not a major component of an admission decision except for a limited number of research intensive programs. (See document cited above.) In fact, according to MSQ (Matriculating Student Questionnaire), only 83% of all matriculating students reported having any research experience at all. (Experience could be as little as 1 semester or one summer for the purposes of the questionnaire.) Hospital internships are not required nor expected of applicants. (Clinical volunteering is, but this can be done at non-hospital sites and on an informal basis.)
Because it really doesn’t matter.
Because the prestige of one’s undergrad education really doesn’t contribute significantly to a student’s potential for success in medical school.
Because not everyone can afford to attend a brand name private “prestige” college. Med school admissions are increasing skewed toward upper middle class and upper class applicants and the LCME and AAMC realize the inequity of this situation. Medical schools have been urged during the past 10 years to broaden their ideas of “acceptable” undergrad schools–which they have.
Because med schools are interested in drawing their students from a broad range of SES backgrounds and experiences. There are objective data that show patients are better able to relate with to physicians from their own ethnicity & SES background. There are also data that show that students from lower SES backgrounds tend to go to work in lower SES communities–most of which have great unmet medical needs. Remember, medical school admissions serves the interest of the patients–not the applicants.
Because some students, through no fault of their own, are disadvantaged by the the public educational systems they attended and did not qualify for admission to “prestige” schools, but nevertheless are capable and intelligent and are able to “catch up” in college and be successful in med school.
There are others reasons as well, but the above ought to be sufficient.
@ucbalumnus You seriously cannot look at that chart and say that prestige doesn’t matter unless you come to the conclusion that the only high GPA/MCAT scores came from those particular colleges (which is essentially a top 20 list, minus UM and UCB of course), which is ludicrous.
The admissions staff at graduate and medical schools have experience with incoming students from a wide range of schools. They know how last year’s students from universities A and B have done this year in their program.
Also CC is full of experienced people, often parents, who have degrees from MIT or Stanford or UNH or Rutgers or Harvard or U.Mass or somewhere else and who have worked with people who have graduated from all of these schools and many more. We continuously tell people that just going to the school with the biggest name or the highest ranking is not the thing to do. You need to find a school that is a good fit for you, which unfortunately is much more difficult to ascertain than just “US News Ranking”.
Of all the problems with US education, this one is not on my list.
“What really would be useful for this discussion is if applicant, interviewee, and admit GPA and MCAT ranges were published by undergraduate school. Without that, it is not obvious whether “prestige” schools are actually favored in admissions, or if they just happen to have already selected the strongest students in terms of earning high grades in courses (GPA) and high test scores (MCAT).”
@ucbalumnus WashU is the only school that I know of that does publish this data in detail, and in the AAMC format. WashU’s results (2016/17) are on p21 of this document: https://prehealth.wustl.edu/Documents/Handbook2017Online.pdf
This data is only for first time applicants, so not 100% complete, and I am also not sure if it includes DO schools. It seems that WashU grads are getting accepted at a decent rate in lower GPAs - still higher than the overall national average in the 3.0-3.59 ranges, suggesting med schools do pay attention to undergrad rigor, even if it’s not in the top 2 levels of importance, as @WayOutWestMom points out. It would be so easy if all schools published their results like WashU does, it’s really helpful data.
Those numbers on page 21 are head scratchers once you get past the first rows! It makes sense if it is not specific to MD.