PSedrishMD

Hey, you'll make it if you keep working. Granted, you've killed your chances for HMS or JHU, but you'll get into a good med school with your 3.4 (well, i have to give you something to work toward ) and MCATs of 30 or better.

This seeming paradox is one of Sakky's favorite subjects; perhaps he'll add a brief note to this thread.

celebrian25

You know you chose the ivy with grade deflation, or at least no inflation, princeton, harvard, yale all have large amounts of grade inflation, and I can bet my bottom dollar if you and another canidate are exactly alike in all other ways except college and gpa. And they went somewhere less competetive but got a higher gpa, say a 3.8 or higher, they would get in and you wouldn't. A 3.22 is good for cornell, but med schools are always trying to up their stats.

rds248

Dragon, don't be depressed. As Doc Sedrich said, you'll make it if you keep working. When you get beyond the lower level courses, it gets a lot easier to get A's at Cornell (although it never gets easy). If you get through the next two semesters, and can do decently in Organic chem and genetics, you will be OK. By senior year if you get into the 3.4-3.6 range your chances will be very good! My first year gpa was worse than yours, and I made it. I'm sorry my previous post depressed you, but I was just trying to give binsbts a realistic view of how tough premed is at Cornell, which you have confirmed.
When you get there (to med school) you'll find it easy, and you'll have a good chance at getting a great residency. Just to put some perspective on the whole thing.. I went to what most people would consider a midlevel medical school because it was the only school I got into. It was not a school known for research but had very good clinical training. The class was very bright, but not anywhere near the level of the premeds at Cornell. I graduated at the top of the class and got one of the most competitive residencies. When I started my residency, there were students from Harvard Med School, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, etc. And guess what... they didn't know a heck of a lot more than I did. All US med schools are good, and provide the basic info that you need. In many ways, where you end up as a resident is a lot more important. So just keep up the work, don't get down, and enjoy Cornell, because it's an awesome school!

norcalguy

Not to turn this into a b*tchfest about Cornell but I go to Cornell as well.

I don't think anyone should go into Cornell thinking that they can beat out the "less bright" students at Cornell. I went to Cornell with a 1550 SATI score, 800,800,780 SAT II scores, 3.98 unweighted GPA at a top public high school, and 5's on every AP test I ever took. Three semesters later, I have a 3.76 GPA. It's not horrible but it's not super either. The students here are very bright but, more importantly, very hard working. SAT scores really don't mean much here. I have a super-motivated friend who only got 1100 on her SAT's but has a GPA at Cornell that's in the high 3.9's (she's premed also).

This isn't to discourage anyone from applying to or enrolling in Cornell. I truly believe that all of this hardwork will pay off later. Yes, Cornellians have to sacrifice a few points on their GPA's but they will make it up on the MCAT's. If you go to mdapplicant.com, you will see that the average GPA's of the 15 or so Cornell applicant profiles is only 3.69 but the average MCAT score of the same 15 people is over 33. And of course, there is the 89% acceptance rate into med school among its applicants with GPA's of 3.4 or above. I'm sure that includes prescreening but many schools prescreen their applicants. If you're going to pay $40,000 a year for college, you might as well get your money's worth on the education.

celebrian25

SAT doesn't measure your intelligence, as some people seem to believe. You need more than hard work to succeed in the top colleges.

Dragon1817

So it seems as if everyone understands that Cornell is a tough school and that it really forces its students to work their hardest. I would assume everyone agrees that a GPA at Cornell is a little bit more impressive than that same GPA at most other schools.... Why dont the med schools "get it" then?

Seems like the system is unfair.... anyone can try to explain to me how this doesnt seem dumb.

norcalguy

Med schools do get it and Cornell's acceptance rate to med school is fairly high. I think it is quite useless though to wallow in self-pity. Do your best. I think a 3.5 at Cornell is quite achievable. Cornell offers many research opportunities. Take advantage of those.

Oh yea, if you're taking Chem 216 next sem. you might want to consider dropping down to 208.

celebrian25

well the thing is...med schools want a high acceptance rate for all the perks it brings

cornellkhoja

Another freshman at Cornell.
I'm also a bio/econ double major. My first semester at Cornell wasn't too bad (intro chem, bio, calc and FWS) and i currently have a 3.9 GPA and am doing research. This may be impressive, but it really isn't i know. As a Cornell grad, rds248, would you say it's advisable to finish the pre-med requirements and then perhaps drop the bio major and do econ and other courses that you like and would boost your GPA, while continuing to do research??

Any input from Cornelians about intro bio. I got a B+ in bio lab and A- in bio lecture (my lowest combined grade point of any course(s)), I was thinking of switching to BIo 106 (autotutorial) for next semster..any thoughts??

thanks,

Greybeard

Ag at Cornell is still Ag (Agricultural and Life Sciences). The College of Human Ecology changed its name from Home Econonics, sometime in the 1960s, I believe.Thanks, Grey

asterstar

Argh...all this stuff about Harvard's grade inflation is making me frustrated. My sibling goes there, and like PSedrish said, it is so difficult to get a true A. An A- is achievable with eons of work, and a B+ also requires tremendous work. But in the end, you're competing against the best and brightest kids in the country, and every class that you take has whiz kid who specializes in that subject area. So the whiz kids get the pure A's, very hard workers get the A-'s, and so forth. It may seem that Harvard is grade-inflated, but in reality there are many kids who get sub-3.5 GPA's at Harvard who would have received 3.8-3.9's at second-level or state schools.

calkidd

Let me put the grade inflation thing into perspective for you Harvard people out there. First off, I've studied at Harvard, MIT and UC Berkeley, so I have experienced the coursework and grading at all three places. To the statement "But in the end, you're competing against the best and brightest kids in the country, and every class that you take has whiz kid who specializes in that subject area" - yeah, that's why you shouldn't expect an A. If an EECs whiz kid at MIT takes a hardcore physical chemistry class, he doesn't expect an A- or even a B+, even after "eons of work."

Second, the way in which grades are obtained: at a public school like Berkeley and to some extent at MIT, grades are determined more by test scores, which is a far more arbitrary way to determine grades than with projects or homework assigments (which constitute a higher proportion of grades at Harvard); after all, Harvard students are going to put in those all nighters to finish the projects right? You're dreaming if you don't think that students at UIUC or Cornell wouldn't do the same thing if they were given the chance.

Third, the statement "So the whiz kids get the pure A's, very hard workers get the A-'s, and so forth." Come on, it's Harvard. Everyone should be a hard worker (and most people are). But an A isn't about psychological perseverance or perspiration. It's about achieving a certain level of mastery in the material as shown by your performance. Some kids will work real hard and show their commitment and still not do too well - that's one of the reasons why recommendation letters are done. An A at Harvard ought to mean more than an A at most other places given the caliber of student who gets in.

Finally, if it's so hard for students to do well at Harvard, why is it that while around 50% of Harvard Med School is comprised of Harvard undergraduates, the top students almost always (see post on classic CC forum) come from Cornell, MIT or Caltech, especially when so few students from among those three places can muster the GPA required for admission?

asterstar

I don't really understand what you're saying- not trying to attack you or anything, but I don't understand the main point of your post.

No where did I say that Harvard kids should expect A's. Of course, they know that they might not get A's because of the quality of the student body. But it would be nice if everyone didn't degrade A's at Harvard as being the result of grade inflation.

"An A at Harvard ought to mean more than an A at most other places given the caliber of student who gets in."- That's exactly what I was saying. But everyone thinks that it's easy to get A's at Harvard, and like everyone has been saying, a 3.0-3.3 at an Ivy will almost always be trumped by a 3.8-4.0 at a state school. So basically, med schools don't think that the A at a state school means any less than at Harvard or other Ivies.

More arbitrary grading doesn't necessarily mean harder grading...altho again, I'm not sure what you're saying here.

I can't really argue against you since you're basically proving my point with much of what you were saying. Also, I didn't compare Harvard to other Ivies like Cornell. I have no personal experience or sources with Cornell, so I didn't comment on it, but I know that it's very difficult as well.

calkidd

More arbitrary grading leads to "harder" grading in the sense of a bigger distribution of grades; that means that someone who makes careless errors during in class exams but still understands the material might very well end up getting a B- or C+. When your grade is mostly based on projects and hwk assignments, you don't account as much for the arbitrary factors involved with test taking; you further have the opportunity to get help from teachers and TAs. So it's a bit of a stretch for Harvard students to think that they'd automatically get that 3.8 or 3.9 were they to be enrolled at another school.

Something else to think about: when an MIT student is premed or having trouble staying qualified academically, a tried and true strategy that he/she can try is to take one or a few classes at Harvard. Does that mean that every class at Harvard is an easy A? No, but it does mean that it's an easy A relative to a similar class at MIT.

asterstar

I'm confused again. First you say that arbitrary grading, which occurs at non-Harvard schools, is harder...than you imply that test-centered classes (at Harvad) are harder b/c you get B/C's for careless mistakes, but in project-based classes you have more opportunities to "get help"....then you say that Harvard students wouldn't necessarily get high GPA's at other schools, because they're hard as well. huh?

Btw, in my original post I was talking about state schools, and I definitely think that the *majority* of Harvard students could pull a 3.8-3.9 at a place like UF.

"Does that mean that every class at Harvard is an easy A? No, but it does mean that it's an easy A relative to a similar class at MIT."

Well, I've heard about Harvard students taking humanities classes at MIT to boost their GPA, so the reverse is true as well.