Undergraduate schools with GPA inflation

[Alexander99]

Just a quick question. People often talk about the reputation of schools that have GPA inflation vs those that have tough grading. Do AdComs really have that type of information?

For example, my buddy went to Georgetown and he said it was pretty hard to get anything lower than a B if you put any kind of effort into the class and if you tried somewhat hard, you'd easily get an A. At my college, in many of the sciences classes (physics, bio, etc), it's common for professors to set the mean at C+/B- meaning you've really got to go crazy to get that A or A-. Do you think they look into it enough to consider my 3.6 is better than his 3.6 or will they just see the numbers and consider them equal?

Alexander

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[CrazyPerson]

thats like my school... class average for chem was B- C+

only 2 got As

 

[trauma_junky]

I hear ya on this one! The Texas System states they do take undergradute institution into account, but I think it's all a ploy. I'm doing graduate work at UTSA. Its challenging work, but the undergradute students here are not of the highest caliber. I've audited a few undergrad classes here and they were a complete joke. A biochem exam that was multiple choice, please! An organic class that lets you have a one page cheat sheet for the exam. I did my undergrad at Texas A&M, they went out of their way to bust your balls in some classes and they were just plain hard in others. A far cry from here at UTSA. The sad thing, lots of people here are getting Med school interviews, first round ones at that. 26 MCAT and 3.8 GPA's which with the effort in these classes would be equivalent to a C at TAMU. Bottom line, as long as it's not a JC, an A is an A weather it's from MIT or Sul Ross College.

Very Sad in my opinion, esp. if you went to a challenging institution and had to work your way through. Makes life real challenging later on, esp for med school admissions.😡

 

[Alexander99]

Originally posted by trauma_junky
The sad thing, lots of people here are getting Med school interviews, first round ones at that. 26 MCAT and 3.8 GPA's which with the effort in these classes would be equivalent to a C at TAMU. Bottom line, as long as it's not a JC, an A is an A weather it's from MIT or Sul Ross College.

Very Sad in my opinion, esp. if you went to a challenging institution and had to work your way through. Makes life real challenging later on, esp for med school admissions.😡

Yeah. I think the ultimate way to get into med school is as follows:

1. Go to an undergrad school like the one you mentioned
2. Be a psychology major
3. Study somewhat and get your 4.0 in psych and core classes required for med school (4.0 Sci GPA too)
4. Spend the time you save by not having to study for your classes and study for the MCAT for 2 full years (score 33+)
5. Get into the med school of your choice

Of course, good luck when you make it to a good med school and you're up against people that went to tough schools and are actually smart.

 

[link26]

gpa inflation/deflation are taken into account.

but they won't make up for gpa deficiencies. just remember that.

the whole process is a bunch of bullsh1t with no fixed rules.

 

[beatla19]

All my science classes are curved at a C, but my pre-med advisor says our school isn't national so med schools won't take our "C-curve" into account.

 

[NRAI2001]

Originally posted by trauma_junky
I hear ya on this one! The Texas System states they do take undergradute institution into account, but I think it's all a ploy. I'm doing graduate work at UTSA. Its challenging work, but the undergradute students here are not of the highest caliber. I've audited a few undergrad classes here and they were a complete joke. A biochem exam that was multiple choice, please! An organic class that lets you have a one page cheat sheet for the exam. I did my undergrad at Texas A&M, they went out of their way to bust your balls in some classes and they were just plain hard in others. A far cry from here at UTSA. The sad thing, lots of people here are getting Med school interviews, first round ones at that. 26 MCAT and 3.8 GPA's which with the effort in these classes would be equivalent to a C at TAMU. Bottom line, as long as it's not a JC, an A is an A weather it's from MIT or Sul Ross College.

Very Sad in my opinion, esp. if you went to a challenging institution and had to work your way through. Makes life real challenging later on, esp for med school admissions.😡

A biochem exam that was multiple choice, please! An organic class that lets you have a one page cheat sheet for the exam. I did my undergrad at Texas A&M, they went out of their way to bust your balls in some classes and they were just plain hard in others

WHAT a cheat sheet in organic, thats rediculous. At my school, most people worked really really hard to get Cs in most science classes.

 

[winstonm]

At least some of the US schools take the undergrad institution into account. Most Canadian school explicitly state that they do not and there is a huge difference in the difficulty/expectations among schools. Nearly every course in my transcript has a C average; professors are required to explain any class average that is significantly higher. Take Human Physiology for ex. The first test had a 65% avg, the second a 58%. Even after the people who were failing dropped it,the third was a 56%.

Yet I know people that have gone to other scholls and significantly increased their science marks from high school and no, it's not due to some type of inspiration they received in first year.

Bottom line here is get your A's in the easiest possible undergrad school, do prereqs in summer and watch the letters come in. It's BS with so few med schools, but that's the game so what can u do?? I could make crazy dough putting out a guide to getting into Canadian medical schools and it would pretty much say, "Don't go to McGill or Toronto for undergrad!!"😉

 

[twinklz]

I think it depends a lot on where you're interested in med school and where you went to undergrad. I know at my last two interviews everyone (both fellow interviewees and the interviewers) was impressed with where I went. When he asked about my grades he seemed to understand that a B here is no small feat (maybe it helps that both of his kids went here) But for the rest of my interviews I don't think it will help me that much since, although its a top ten liberal arts school, its not a huge name.

 

[kbreed]

At the University of Utah, they have a large database of the average GPA of students accepted to med school from your undergraduate school. If you are a standard deviation above or below that mark, you get brownie points or nailed, as the case may be.

 

[periodic]

some med schools know about the relative difficulty of some undergrad schools. some don't. chances are, many med schools know about the curriculum at undergrad schools with "national" reputations and/or where they've taken kids from before.

admissions offices pay attention to how kids do in med school to see if they can count on a certain caliber from particular schools, or if their expectations are falling flat. same thing for residency matches. grades aren't all that matter. they might really like kids from X or Y because they are self-motivated or community service oriented.

 

[bor0101]

hi, i am a freshman and deciding on what to major in. Right now, i plan to either go into medical school or into military aviation. Lifestyle is important to me, and i think these 2 careers at least have a better lifestyle than engineers...
well i go to mcgill,montreal and i noticed the following things about grades. in my freshman physics class(i took the one that's geared for physics/engineering students and there is another version geared for bio/chem students) the avg was a b+(the professor told us). In general chem class the avg i believe was a b-. I dont know about bio, but i think it was also b+. In calc3 i dont know the average, but its the only class of the 4 that i got an A in... I also know that people here study a lot, especially the bio/chem majors. In high school the average grade in my school was a C, but if you did your hw every day(and i didnt), you were the top of the class, and here most people do hw every day.

But in general i noticed, that certain majors have more people that study a lot. And i think Bio and Psychology and Management are those majors. In Psychology in our school, you even have to have a 3.5 gpa to go into an honours program(in most majors its 3.0). Thats why im considering to do an honours math major. It may seem hard, but here are my reasons:

i noticed that upper math classes have avg grades of b+/a- (while in bio and chem it is normal to have b-/c+ and there again most students that havent flunked yet are hardworking). also you can do the honours program with hardly any labs/research. While in bio/chem you are required many lab classes and up to 12 credits of research in the end(which takes a lot of time). also the graduate math courses are worth 4credits, even though they dont require any extra work(in the library they have last year's final exams for all subjetcts, and these are all regular classes). If i take in senior year 4 math classes for 16 credits, my schedule will look like 9:35-13:25, 3 days/wk and no classes on tu/th.... And also math is about the only subject where there is no required writing(this is not my strong point)-i noticed that even in biochem classes you have to write some things on the final...
And of course most math students dont go to med school, so they will not commit any suicides if their gpa is 'only' a 3.2. If my gpa is 3.2 i'll be happy to choose marine aviation as a career...

the bad thing i noticed about math so far. i am taking an honours diff eqnts class, which is not really a core class(physics and engineering) students can also take it. It's not like math analysis... And i noticed that our class is over 80%-85% males. In the bio classes, on the other hand, they even have attractive girls there and if you come into some upper level class, you dont feel lost.

also, i didnt tell my parents that i want to choose math yet. but i asked my mom on her opinion of biology or chemistry major and she said chemistry is bad because it contains too much math! And she is a biology ph.d. and i must choose my major in march/april.

 

[Chrisobean]

"cheat" sheets in orgo do not help that much... try drawing a synthesis rxn on a 3x5 index card... ours had to be hand written, so by the time you wrote small enough to fit all the practice exam problems on the sheet, you couldnt read it without a magnifying glass, which was not permitted btw. and that plastic molecule kit barely had enough pieces to build ethanol.

i thought a C class average was normal for exams, especially when the class has hundreds of students. some physics exams you could get a 40 and that was a C+. so theoretically you could get an A with like an 80, but no one scored that high, it was impossible!