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<li>abcdef claims Cornell screens on the basis that it has a committee that writes rec letters for its applicants. He accused ND of the same thing. His reasoning is that any school with a high(er) acceptance rate than Berkeley (ie acceptance rates in the 80’s and 90’s) must have screened. Clearly that is a wild accusation with no basis in reality.
And, yes, some schools do screen their applicants. Not Cornell.</li>
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<h1>4 was just an note. It’s not even up for debate. I just found it interesting because I attended a premed panel of seniors this week at Cornell and then came back to read another thread discussing the premed senior panel at Berkeley. If I had attended the panel at Berkeley, I would’ve noted the fact that none of the seniors were going to med schoool right out of college as interesting as well.</h1>
<h1>3 is a statement made on the fact that Berkeley is a public school (and therefore its applicant pool is limited), its freshman (not necessarily premeds) have lower avg. SAT scores (the best basis for measuring student quality across schools), and the fact Berkeley accepts an inordinate amount of transfers from community colleges after two years. I am from Norcal obviously and have seen many friends/HS classmates go to CC for two years, get a 3.9, and then transfer to Berkeley. This is why I believe the discrepancy in SAT scores between Berkeley juniors and Cornell juniors is even bigger than the discrepancy b/w freshmen. Is there a reason you believe that the difference between Cornell premeds and Berkeley premeds might not be representative of the difference between the student body as a whole?</h1>
<p>It is also important to note that two of Cornell’s schools (Hotel Admin and Architecture) produce just about 0 premeds and those are the two schools that place very little emphasis on SAT scores (median SAT score might be in the 1200’s). It is arguable that Cornell premeds would have SIGNIFICANTLY higher SAT scores than the Cornell student body as a whole.</p>