<p>wjb, hasn’t your S heard, Y has incredible grade inflation and everyone is just about guaranteed an A! :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Gee, emom, I don’t think he got that memo. ;)</p>
<p>Ahhh, commiserating about Orgo. Nice to see their little brains straining with effort. It didn’t seem to happen much in high school. Yale math and science will take care of this part of character building.</p>
<p>Maybe I was being too oblique, above. Anyways, my daughter also took Freshman Org. this year, may end up applying to medical schools but is not sure, has worked very hard in that course, has done pretty well so far (but at the cost of huge amount of work and anxiety) and has seen that there definitely are other freshmen who entered Yale with a clear goal of applying to medical school, who declined the opportunity to take Freshman Org for the strategic, gpa and future-chem-workload-oriented reasons mentioned a while ago by entomom. Oy. - i don’t really know much about medical schools and their admissions culture. I hope the word on the street, that raw GPA is all that matters, does not totally capture the reallity, but I certainly could be wrong.</p>
<p>To anyone’s knowledge, where is the curve typically centered in an introductory organic chemistry course at Yale?</p>
<p>The curve – I don’t know, but it depends on which course. Freshman orgo may well be curved higher than regular intro orgo (offered only to post-freshmen). But here’s the reality you have to keep in mind:</p>
<p>The percentage of entering freshmen at Yale (and other top-whatever schools) who think that they will fulill pre-med requirements and eventually apply to med school is (based on my spotty recollection of seeing some such statistic somewhere, once upon a time): about 30%. The percentage of seniors at these schools who actually apply to medical school is more like 10%. At Yale, and probably at most of these schools, 80% or more of those who do apply to med school get in. So you have to wrap your head around those statistics, and realize they represent the fact that many freshmen, who have been excellent students thus far in their lives, realize either that they’re not all that interested in medicine, or realize that they’re not likely to do well enough in undergrad to have a good shot. Whether a school has a big reputation as having ‘weed-out’ classes or not is a matter of whether we’re talking 30-10-80 (more or less, at Yale) or 50-15-80 (hypothetical numbers) at some place like Johns Hopkins. In fact, they all pretty much have a weed-out system, with small differences in the severity.</p>
<p>The reasons for this are not because the undergrad schools are evil - it’s because a lot of teens don’t really know what they want to do, but medicine is an honorable way to be of service, and have a decent/great income and community stature all rolled into one. For kids who have done reasonably well in high school biology and chemistry, it looks like an obvious answer. Eventually, they bump up against the reality that competition for spots at medical schools is intense. Or they discover that there are other things they really want to do with their lives.</p>
<p>So if I don’t show up to take the tests, would that negatively affect me? I’ve already matriculated to Yale 2014…</p>
<p>No, you’re not going to be rescinded for not taking AP tests.</p>