Majors?

[georgiadat]

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Do adcoms prefer certain majors over others? For instance, would a student who majored in business with a 3.5 be looked at the same as a student who majored in chem/bio/physics with a 3.1? I have not taken business classes, but am assuming physical chemistry is a more difficult class than an upper level business class. What do you guys think? Thanks!

 

[BONAFIED]

Generally business courses are easier than the hard sciences. So I think your presumption is correct. However, "business" is a broad area of study. I have degrees in finance and econ, and the econ at my univeristy is not a social science, so it is almost entirely quantitative. I spent a lot of my junior and senior year doing calculus, stats, advanced algebra, regression analysis, linear modeling. IMO more in common with science than management or marketing major. Although, still not as difficult as majoring in chem, physics, or math.

 

[georgiadat]

thanks Bonafied. I was just curious to see if the adcoms take that into account.

 

[BONAFIED]

I think adcoms would be dumb not to consider the rigor of an applicant's major and how it correlates to their GPA. So yes, I do think they take that into account when making decisions. However the problem, at least with other professional schools, is the significant pressure on all but the most elite universities to admit students with higher GPAs regardless of their majors.

Why? US News rankings. Their rankings are based largely on "selectivity" which is a composite of class GPA, test scores, and numbers of applicants. This criteria make up to 40% of their total rank IIRC. Whether a school plays this game, and to what extent, is largely an issue of integrity. This applies not only to the difficulty of majors, but to other aspects of an appicants background like extra-curriculars, work experience etc. It's really tempting for universities to pad their classes with a bunch of easy majors that have 4.0 GPAs, rather than having some smart students with 3.0's.

There is a school near where I live that is obsessed with rankings. In the past number of years I watched how they have manipulated (IMO) the statistics of their "selectivity" to make large leaps in their ranking. When you look critically at their stats, they are anomalous, and prove just how far some schools will go to increase their status and the expense of their academics. Kind of an ironic reversal of the "students who are in it only for the grade and not to learn" scenario.

 

[trypmo]

Although dental schools are no longer ranked per se, I have to agree that the mentality of worrying about average stats for the incoming class has to have persisted regardless. Dental schools know they're still being compared to each other!

 

[ItsGavinC]

I think adcoms would be dumb not to consider the rigor of an applicant's major and how it correlates to their GPA. So yes, I do think they take that into account when making decisions.

Which is interesting, because my experience is that they *rarely* take major into consideration.

They expect you to do well in whatever major you choose. NOBODY is going to sit down and weed through each and every transcript, trying to understand what courses are more demanding than others.

Also, dental school is demanding, so getting a 3.0 but saying "my major was tough" doesn't really equate to anything at all. Dental school will be tough, so if a 3.0 is all you can muster then they'll choose other applicants.

 

[toofache32]

I think they actually like "non-traditional" applicants. My college degree was in music. My interviews loved that and spent the entire time talking about it. I guess they get really bored when they see yet another chemistry major who has nothing to talk about except his boring research.

 

[BONAFIED]

They expect you to do well in whatever major you choose. NOBODY is going to sit down and weed through each and every transcript, trying to understand what courses are more demanding than others.

I agree Gavin. But some professional schools do look at your major and take its perceived level of difficulty into consideration. For instance, many applicants to law school are engineering majors. Not as a rule, but as a general guideline these applicants are competitive at schools where the average admitted GPA is 0.5 higher than theirs (all other factors equal). This is also true of business school. I'm new to the realm of dental school admissions, but I've looked at many of their admissions critieria. Almost all of the schools have "course load and difficult of subject matter" listed as one of the considerations for acceptance. Of course like I pointed out in my previous posts, some schools are after just the GPA, and if they are, they probably wouldn't admit it.

 

[JavadiCavity]

I think that Adcoms are mostly interested in your GPA. As long as you do well in your pre-reqs, I don't think your major is too important. In fact, I think Adcoms like to see diversity among their applicants.