<p>Can it be confidently said that Brown is the easiest place for premed?</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say that Brown is the easiest place for anything. If you want to go somewhere easy, this isn’t the place. However, if you want to be challenged and learn a lot, Brown’s the perfect place.</p>
<p>Their PLME program is very, very good, but if your a normal pre-med student that is non PLME, you still have to fulfill your medical school requirement classes like everyone else (and do the MCAT etc.).</p>
<p>However, Brown’s open curriculum and pass/fail system can be very useful for pre-med students. So saying that Brown is the “easiest place for premed” is a maybe, borderline yes.</p>
<p>Oh, and by easiest, I mean compared to other Ivies and top universities.</p>
<p>I definitely agree with finishmydrink in that the open curriculum can make things more fun for pre-med students. However, most pre-meds cannot take their med school pre-rec classes S/NC as medical schools want to see the actual grades.</p>
<p>Also, Brown’s organic chemistry is known for being one of the toughest classes around, even compared to other Ivies and top universities. I definitely wouldn’t classify anything about being premed at Brown (even being a PLME) as “easy.”</p>
<p>Brown has a pass/fail system? Can someone please elaborate on this? This would be perfect for pre-med students?</p>
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<p>Any class can be taken satisfactory/no credit (essentially pass/fail, though the failures are not reflected on the transcript). Most students, I’ve gathered, use this for about one class a semester, though one could apply it to all. Satisfactory/no credit classes do not affect one’s GPA.</p>
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<p>As bruno14 indicated, medical schools want the pre-medical requirements to be taken for a letter grade.</p>
<p>^Thanks for the info silverturtle, the system does still seem to be beneficial, especially for pre-med students.</p>
<p>^^Technically we don’t have a GPA, and so you just compute your own. A big reason Brown’s considered easy for premeds is that failing a course doesn’t affect your transcript, and it’s impossible to get a D, so there are literally no students with less than a C average.</p>
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<p>Right; sorry, I forgot that.</p>
<p>Most people do not take classes in their major s/nc, though you can take pre-req’s that way. It is very useful for taking classes outside your comfort zone, or languages, which are just taken for interest (my daughter, a math/cs major took Mandarin and Russian.)</p>
<p>“…if your a normal pre med student…”. How on earth is it possible that Brown turned away over 30,000 students who write better
English than this shockingly bush league inanity??? What does it take to know the difference between “your” and “you are”??? Is that too much to ask??? The social agendas of
many schools are resulting in a complete mockery of educational standards and claims of academic excellence. It is brazen, shameless, and pretty much incomprehensible. And yes, my comment is based on a LOT more evidence than what I cited here.
We are not supposed to notice these travesties, and to keep quiet if we do notice, but once in a while it must be said.</p>
<p>^I practically majored in linguistics, so let me explain a couple things to you:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The real ‘language’ in a language is the spoken language. Written language is a learned bastardization of a given spoken language. When people compose in their heads, they compose in spoken language, which makes no distinction among true homonyms. Depending on the degree of care that a writer is exercising, s/he may or may not take the time to make sure that s/he has articulated her/his thought consistent with learned rules of written English. That means nothing about her/his education or ability to write ‘correctly’ in other contexts.</p></li>
<li><p>Rules like the your/you’re distinction are some of the very easiest and most well understood in all of language. There are about a thousand more difficult, more complicated, and less well-understood linguistic rules exemplified by finishmydrink’s post. Your post is pure pedantism.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Thank you, mgcsinc, for that defense of intellectual laxity and
fecklessness. I had mistakenly assumed that to qualify for a place like Brown, one needed to have enough mental discipline so that
such basics would be as natural as breathing! Carry on.</p>
<p>The Internet – particularly this place – is not always for careful attention to writing. If we all spent as much time as you advocate, carefully forming our words, this would be a much less lively, active place. And that would suck.</p>
<p>All of this is, of course, ignoring the formatting mess that is every post you make.</p>
<p>What exactly is the genesis of your stalwart espousal of the shabby
mental discipline that is the subject here? Do they encourage it at Brown? Format this: what I am suggesting is nothing more than a
little respect for language, and that should require NO effort!!! If it
takes “effort” to exercise such rudimentary discipline…well, my guess would be that the person has been “getting by” so far, and has not been called on it. You are OK with that, I disagree. I have
seldom seen great brilliance issue from minds that confuse “there”
and “their”, “your” and “you’re” etc etc. Homonyms should not bewitch our intelligence!!!</p>
<p>Sorry…meant to say “homophones”…</p>
<p>If you are suck a stickler for language, oxonianeliduky, you would know that your sentence “Brown turned away over 30,000 students” is technically incorrect. “Over” is used to describe physical juxtaposition, as in the cat jumped over the moon. “Brown turned away more than 30,000 students” would be correct.</p>
<p>And since you are using bush league as an adjective, you need to hyphenate, as in “bush-league inanity.”</p>
<p>(I actually agree that the writing on CC can be quite dismal and disappointing to us grammar nerds, but much worse examples of it can be found than the ‘your’ ‘you’re’ issue in the posting above, which may have occurred because of fast typing or use of a smartphone.)</p>
<p>Anyway, to make this post even remotely relevant, I would say that anyone who thinks Brown is easy for pre-med needs to first pass organic chemistry.</p>
<p>oxonianeliduky, all I am saying is that your understanding of ‘language’ is an uneducated one. The kind of fear that you have about the ‘degradation’ of language – the stuff of evening news stories about kids using ‘lol’ in high school essays – is based on a confused understanding of what’s going on when young people do something unexpected with written language. It confuses the tough stuff of language – rules that even people who spend their entire lives studying language can’t figure out – with the easy stuff, like distinguishing between possessives and contractions. Language pedants like yourself misunderstand mistakes born of informality or inattention – inattention which, by the way, is acceptable to many in my generation in the context of internet forums, and which greases the wheels of internet dialog – for bad education, misinformation, or ‘disrespect for language’.</p>
<p>When I talk to you in person, verbally, do I distinguish between they’re and their? No. Do you accuse me of not being accurate in that context? Certainly not! The sooner that you come to understand Internet speech as a form of verbal speech for many people, the sooner you’ll see your blood pressure drop.</p>
<p>There are people out there – they’re called ‘linguists’ and they have PhD’s – that spend their entire professional careers thinking about language, and they don’t see a problem where you see one. That should mean something to you.</p>
<p>Lots of !!! LOTS OF ???
Odd
breaks.</p>
<p>On top of that complains about others’ forum writing (when obviously they need to work on it themselves…). Not worth the wear on your fingertips to argue with.</p>