Grade Deflation & Med School Admissions

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SpongeBobby

Next month I'm going to start my freshman year at Johns Hopkins University and I'm really worried about my situation. The school has no grade inflation & the competition is tight. There's no question that my GPA would be higher at my state school (Rutgers). I don't want to be weeded out.

Will Med Schools take the deflation/competition into account?

Should I try to transfer to Rutgers A.S.A.P & earn a higher GPA with less work?

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I have a lot of friends at Hopkins, and don't believe all the rumors. Yes it is hard, but they aren't failing everyone out there or anything close. You can do well there if you work hard. Don't go to Rutgers just b/c you think it will be easier and get you into a better med school. Go to Hopkins, it is a great school and will prepare you well for medical school. Besides, I think Hopkins has a high acceptance rate into med school and you would be crazy to pass up living in Baltimore (I love the area).

Good Luck and don't stress too much yet. There will be plenty of tim for that in the future.


ap
 
Originally posted by SpongeBobby
Next month I'm going to start my freshman year at Johns Hopkins University and I'm really worried about my situation. The school has no grade inflation & the competition is tight. There's no question that my GPA would be higher at my state school (Rutgers). I don't want to be weeded out.

Will Med Schools take the deflation/competition into account?

Should I try to transfer to Rutgers A.S.A.P & earn a higher GPA with less work?

This again. Do a search on the topic. Someone ask the exact same thing about a month ago.

bottom line, if you want to go to a top med school, stay at hopkins, if you want to go to any med school, go to rutgers.
 
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Originally posted by exmike
bottom line, if you want to go to a top med school, stay at hopkins, if you want to go to any med school, go to rutgers.

I think you should add, if you want to go to a top med school, stay at Hopkins and do well." Someone who gets <3.0 at a top undergrad will not be terribly competitive at top med schools. True, your GPA is sometimes "weighted" based on the caliber of school and possibly the difficulty of the major, but it won't make a 2.9 shine by any means.
 
Originally posted by Fermi
I think you should add, if you want to go to a top med school, stay at Hopkins and do well." Someone who gets <3.0 at a top undergrad will not be terribly competitive at top med schools. True, your GPA is sometimes "weighted" based on the caliber of school and possibly the difficulty of the major, but it won't make a 2.9 shine by any means.

very true
 
I posted on this before. Hopkins is not deflated, it is on the lower end of a range that most elite colleges share, around 3.3.
 
personally, i don't think that an elite undergrad does nearly as much for your chances of getting into a top medical school as people on this board seem to think it does. The reality is that 3.3 from JHU is still just a 3.3, which is to say basically at the very low end of being competitive. You are much better off with a 3.5 from Rutgers than a 3.3 from JHU, all else being equal.

It might be fair to point out that MAYBE a 3.4 from JHU is equal to a 3.5 from Rutgers (though, even then I am skeptical), a tenth point difference starts to blue the lines between statistically significant and not so much.

Nor do I think that average grades and MCAT scores from JHU will permit the applicant to get into a top med school. Top programs require HIGH GPA's and HIGH MCAT scores no matter what undergrad you went to. I am sure there are exceptions, but JHU grads, as a rule, do not go waltzing into Harvard and UCSF with 3.5 GPA's and 32 MCAT's. It STILL takes, in the aggregate, 3.8's and 35+'s to do the trick--and those scores would be just as potent even from Big State U.

Just my $0.02.

Judd
 
Congratulations on your acceptance to JHU, I will be applying there early decision this fall. I too was worried about the grading policy, but did [too much] research and realize that it isn't any worse than most top schools. Anyway, good luck this fall, and I hope to see you on campus soon!

--Mike--
 
"You are much better off with a 3.5 from Rutgers than a 3.3 from JHU, all else being equal"

I dont buy it i would say they are equal.

A freind of mine is applying to med school this year from hopkins
the acceptance rate from hopkins 80%+
At fsu we are like...30%

yeah, different quality of students blash blah, but still....its a big differnce.
 
you can get fukt either way.

if you go to a crappier state school, you have to maintain at least a 3.9, and then score high on the MCAT to support your gpa.
Of course, you'll have so much free time to prepare for the MCAT at Big State U that it is highly possible that this will happen. Not to mention, you will have all the free time for extracurriculars to beef up your application. You will still learn the same pre-med $hit, and you'll learn it sufficiently, if not thoroughly, and without all the cutthroats to fend off.

If you go to Hopkins, you will be around better quality students, who will try to stomp on you. You might not have a life. You might even do more poorly on the MCAT. You might not have time for volunteer work.

If you have what it takes to go to JHU, you shouldn't have a problem getting a super high gpa at rutgers.

Assess your own abilities.

A handful of people from Big State U DO get into top med schools.

If i could do undergrad again, I'd go to Big State U and kick everyone's azz and spend more time for ec's.
 
I have heard that the CA schools don't really look at what undergrad school u go to, where many other states do pay much attention to what undergrad school u are from.
 
So if I graduated with a BS in Elec Engineering from Georgia Tech (top 5 engineering schools in the country) with a slightly lower GPA than average, med schools won't look at that?? The cut-off for the dean's list at my school was a 3.0 and there is a for that.

I don't BELIEVE this med school adcoms BS. Ever heard of comparing apples to apples??
 
Originally posted by NRAI2001
I have heard that the CA schools don't really look at what undergrad school u go to, where many other states do pay much attention to what undergrad school u are from.

Right. For instance, Hopkins Med doesn't seem to take undergrad college much into account in admissions, while other top schools (Columbia comes to mind) seem to favor students from highly ranked undergraduate colleges.

That being said, and while it is very important to do well wherever you go, most adcoms WILL usually take into account whether someone's physics degree is from MIT or UNLV.
 
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Ask Johns Hopkins to provide you with statistics of how many people get into med school from Hopkins and what the avg GPA and GPA range is. My school even provided a list that broke down the number of applicants to a particular med school, the number accepted, the number matriculated and for those students that matriculated (if more than 3 did) it provided a GPA avg. and range. From my school (Stanford), I saw that students were accepted to top med schools (UCSF, UCLA, Stanford, Columbia, Harvard) at a higher admission rate and a lower GPA avg. than the school's total avg. For example, UCSF accepted 20% of all Stanford students that applied with an average science GPA of 3.60 (range 3.2--4.0). That year the overall admission rate to UCSF was 5% with an avg. science GPA (of matriculants) of 3.78. I think this may indicate that being from Stanford was helpful for students applying to UCSF. This trend was common for many top schools. (As a side, Stanford had a lower than the overal acceptence rate to places like BU and Mt. Sinai)

However this finding is confounded by the fact that 1) a Stanford student will more likely be a good standardized test taker for the MCAT since they most likely did very well on the SAT and 2) Stanford and other top undergraduate schools provide students with increased access to unique and interesting opportunities than a large state school would (example: a friend go a 3K non-competitive grant to study travel to France to study French films; I got 3K one summer to live on campus and do research at the med center).

From what I have been told at UCSF (I know more about this school than others, hence why I am using it as an example), once you make a certain academic cut-off, your academic profile because a much smaller component of your review. They know you can handle the work, now they want to know why you will make a good student at their school and ultimately a good physician, researcher, etc.

At UCSF, my interviewer said that they do closed file interviews to eliminate some of the bias that an interviewer may impose on their judgement about a student regarding academics. She said that she would definitely be more interested in someone who went to Yale than someone who came from a state school. Without thinking about it before she met the applicant, those would be her first thoughts. I was surprised that she gave me such a truthful answer (I asked her why they did closed file interviews since we put so much time into our applications and I thought an interview should build off of that), but it is true that most people will be impressed with that kind of school almost regardless of how you did by a few GPA points.

Hopefully, that answers some questions and gives some objective evidence as to how your undergrad school may affect admissions. That being said, I don't know if I would put JHU in that category for undergrad. I am not making a claim about JHU being a good school or not (I think it is very good), but I don't think it has the reputation as being the top of the top. It won't have the same "wow" factor as a student walking in from Harvard. If it was a choice of Yale (etc.) vs Rutgers, I would say Yale hands down...
 
Ask Johns Hopkins to provide you with statistics of how many people get into med school from Hopkins and what the avg GPA and GPA range is. My school even provided a list that broke down the number of applicants to a particular med school, the number accepted, the number matriculated and for those students that matriculated (if more than 3 did) it provided a GPA avg. and range. From my school (Stanford), I saw that students were accepted to top med schools (UCSF, UCLA, Stanford, Columbia, Harvard) at a higher admission rate and a lower GPA avg. than the school's total avg. For example, UCSF accepted 20% of all Stanford students that applied with an average science GPA of 3.60 (range 3.2--4.0). That year the overall admission rate to UCSF was 5% with an avg. science GPA (of matriculants) of 3.78. I think this may indicate that being from Stanford was helpful for students applying to UCSF. This trend was common for many top schools. (As a side, Stanford had a lower than the overal acceptence rate to places like BU and Mt. Sinai)

However this finding is confounded by the fact that 1) a Stanford student will more likely being a good standardized test taker for the MCAT since they most likely did very well on the SAT and 2) Stanford and other top undergraduate schools provide students with increased access to unique and interesting opportunities than a large state school would. From what I have been told at UCSF (I know more about this school than others, hence why I am using it as an example), once you make a certain academic cut-off, your academic profile because a much smaller component of your review. They know you can handle the work, now they want to know why you will make a good student at their school and ultimately a good physician, researcher, etc.

At UCSF, my interviewer said that they do closed file interviews to eliminate some of the bias that an interviewer may impose on their judgement about a student regarding academics. She said that she would definitely be more interested in someone who went to Yale than someone who came from a state school. Without thinking about it before she met the applicant, those would be her first thoughts. I was surprised that she gave me such a truthful answer (I asked her why they did closed file interviews since we put so much time into our applications and I thought an interview should build off of that), but it is true that most people will be impressed with that kind of school almost regardless of how you did by a few GPA points.

Hopefully, that answers some questions and gives some objective evidence as to how your undergrad school may affect admissions. That being said, I don't know if I would put JHU in that category for undergrad. I am not making a claim about JHU being a good school or not (I think it is very good), but I don't think it has the reputation as being the top of the top. It won't have the same "wow" factor as a student walking in from Harvard. If it was a choice of Yale (etc.) vs Rutgers, I would say Yale hands down...
 
JHU is that much tougher than Rutgers? Fat chance, perhaps in sociology departments...

Rutgers is not grade inflated like Princeton or some of the Boston schools, I can assure you. The average GPA's end up a little higher because plenty of people take time off when their grades dip - many folks I know have struggled for C's and taken time at a comm. college.

A 3.3 here is a 3.3, a 3.6 is a 3.6, and a 3.9 is a 3.9.

Rutgers is a great school and you can get into anywhere coming from here, but that is no different than any other good school, including Hopkins.

Unless you cannot pay for it/dont like the neighborhood/cant stand the people/miss your family there is no reason to switch schools.

Med schools look at 98% who you are and what you did and 2% the name on your diploma.

If a school appears to look heavily for ivy undergrad, they are usually just filtering for WASP legacies whose parents have been ivies or donors of some sort.

Remember, these 4 yours are not just for you to 'spend time as a premed' - grow up, find yourself, study a subject you enjoy, and teach yourself to think.

You can do that anywhere if you want to, and then you will be presented with the choice to continue in medicine.
 
Originally posted by mosfet

I don't BELIEVE this med school adcoms BS. Ever heard of comparing apples to apples??


We all hope they do. and i'm sure some do try.
but their screening formula's aren't made public. Of course, they say that an A at MIT will be given greater weight than at no-name U. But what "greater weight" means is anyone's guess.
I bet some schools screen without giving consideration to the reputation of the applicant's school.
 
Grades at institutions with high avg. SAT scores are going to be considered more meaningful than those with avg. SAT scores. So if you're from PennState, your MCATs are going to weigh more heavily than your grades.

The "average" Hopkins student got 700+ on all his SAT subject scores. If he gets a B- as the "average" student in organic chem this is NOT the "average" student at Rutgers getting a B-. Someone at a state school having near perfect grades is equal to maybe a person from an elite school getting a 3.6+ However having a 2.7 from Hopkins certainly won't help you, unfortunately.

SAT doesn't always correlate to grades. I know a guy who got a 1300, but had a 3.9 at Hopkins, and is at Hopkins med now. However, as a TREND it holds water. Someone with a 3.6+ at Yale but a 39 MCAT is most likely considered as solid as a 3.9 and 38 at Penn State.

Also, your major matters. If you are biomedical engineering and have a 3.7 or you are biology or public health and have a 3.7 the engineer will be considered over the others all things being equal. That's one reason why so many people at Hopkins apply to major in Biomedical Engineering.

The most important things are 1) your grades, 2) your commitment to medicine, 3) your board scores 4) your major, and recs, 5) your activites and how they show compassion and leadership, 6) your institution and 7) intangible quality and charm as an applicant.

Where you go to school matters, but much less than what you do at the school. The best solution would be to go the best school you can, and excel there.
 
Yea, i can't really see how adcoms WOULDN'T take ugrad school into account. At the higher ranked schools, you are competing with valedictorians and salutatorians and other ppl with ridiculous stats. Getting the "average" at, say, MIT in a computer science class may be off the charts at Big State U...and the tests are sometimes ridiculously harder compared to other schools (check MIT & Stanford CS courses to Big State U courses...)...

Just my 2 cents...

-Ice
 
Rutgers is a "state" univ. school. not a Univ of. big difference, the admission requirements to the SomeState state univ is much lower than the Univ of SomeState.

the course work at the Univ. level is much more demanding compared to the coursework at a state univ. and since you ARE on the east coast, you are competing with top-notch ivy's.

goto hopkins, suck it up, and play their game.
 
Originally posted by kmnfive
Rutgers is a "state" univ. school. not a Univ of. big difference, the admission requirements to the SomeState state univ is much lower than the Univ of SomeState.

the course work at the Univ. level is much more demanding compared to the coursework at a state univ. and since you ARE on the east coast, you are competing with top-notch ivy's.

goto hopkins, suck it up, and play their game.

What??? Rutgers is the state university of NJ. There is no University of New Jersey. What exactly are you talking about?

To the OP: I don't think the prestige of your undergraduate institution really plays as much of a role in med school admissions as some on SDN would like to believe. I chose a lesser-known, small, liberal arts school over Hopkins (and Yale) because I couldn't afford to go to the more prestigious schools, and the small school was very generous to me. I kept my grades up, and I can confidently say that my undergrad didn't hold me back in any way.

Graduates of Rutgers wind up going all over the place. Sure, there are some dim bulbs over there (like there are at all schools), but from my experience, med school ad coms understand that not everyone who is qualified to attend a stellar school can afford to do so.

And if money isn't a factor, then just go where you'll be happiest. Hopkins is a cool place, but if you find that you don't like it there, then just go where you'll be comfortable.
 
Posted by Rapid Decompisition: "Right. For instance, Hopkins Med doesn't seem to take undergrad college much into account in admissions, while other top schools (Columbia comes to mind) seem to favor students from highly ranked undergraduate colleges."

To Rapid Decompisition: Sorry, this isn't the case. Johns Hopkins Medical DOES take into account which undergraduate school you attended. I posted the link below to the MS1 class at JHU Medical a few years ago and you can see the massive amounts of people who got into Johns Hopkins Medical from Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Berkeley, Duke, Dartmouth, Brown, etc...and you can also see that practically all the no-name state schools only got about 1 person in. Why is this? From the grade inflation survey done by Boalt Hall (the law school at UC Berkeley)...we can easily see that there is grade inflation at certain schools while there is actually grade DEFLATION at other schools (MIT, CalTech, Swarthmore, and University of Chicago come to mind here). So since the state universities seem to be placed in the grade inflation category...shouldn't they have more students getting top GPAs? And since they do have more students with top GPAs, shouldn't they be getting MORE kids into Johns Hopkins medical school (proportionately..not in terms of raw numbers) than say...Harvard or Yale? Using percentages, the Ivy league schools and the other elite schools blow the state schools away in terms of how many kids they got into the nation's best medical school. The only conclusion we can reach from this data is that medical school admissions committees know that a 3.7 at MIT is better than a 4.0 at **insert 3rd tier state university here.** Medical school admissions committees (at least at the top schools) would have to take into account the strength and rigor of the undergraduate curriculum...

To see the Boalt Hall grade inflation survey:
http://www.architrave.net/college/gradeadj.htm

To see the entering MS1 class at Johns Hopkins Medical for 1999-2000 academic year: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/education/SOMcatalog/Students.pdf (see page 14)
 
Why don't med school take into consideration how fine someone is? When I see ugly chicks in med school my member gets deflated not my grades.
 
my mistake, since most states have that "state school" and "Univ of State" i just figured that NJ would because its the "east" coast and there so many good schools out there.

in any case, i think it would be better for you to goto a more demanding school. sure its going to be something close to hell for the next 4 years, but you'll do allot of growing. (as stupid as that may sound)... but this is your decision, we have given you our opinions, so well... there it is. do as you will.
 
To whoever said UC's don't factor in the school you come from, that is not true!! UCSF admissions officer used to come to berkeley all the time, and talk about how gpas from stanford and berkeley are definitely better than if you went to a no name uni like Biola or something. and state school doesn't mean easier. for instance, at berkeley the average molecular biology gpa is somewhere around 2.8, and the classes are curved. if you have a 3.7 here, you probably would have gotten a 3.7 at stanford where the average biology gpa is much much higher.
 
To the original poster,

I went to JHU and I can answer any specific questions you have about the school and my experiences there and applying to med school. I don't have the JHU magazine with me, but from what I remember, last year they published a few stats about the pre-med office. 86% of first time applicants gain admission to med school. 93% of second time applicants gain admission. The average MCAT of students applying is 3.62 and the average MCAT is a 31. I might be a 0.1 off the GPA, but I'm pretty sure, it's around 3.6 Some people on this board might tell you that the numbers are a bit skewed because the pre-med advisors might try to discourage you from applying if you don't have those numbers. While they will try to deter you from applying if you have <3.2 or 27 MCAT, they won't flat out deny you any help. I had friends apply with lower numbers than the ones mentioned and still have success in the admissions process.

Anyway, take everything you read on this board with a grain of salt, even my advice. Good luck.
 
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