California Pre-Med

bluebayou
Sat, 27 Nov 2010 00:01:20 +0000

but I wouldn’t say that you can look at the overall test scores at Chapman and know how strong the pre-med students are.



Sure you can, it’s a not a bad proxy absent other inputs, particularly for the science requirements, which require math-type analytical skills. (Calc, Stats, Chem and Physics are a lot of math. Only bio is more memorization). It’s also not a bad proxy for MCAT ability; indeed the 7/8 year med programs focus heavily on SAT scores. As I mentioned earlier, there is a good reason that Harvard students have the highest mean MCAT scores: they also have the highest mean SAT scores…Heck, if SAT scores were not one measure of student quality, why would President Doty be spending big bucks on merit scholarships to lure high scorers?

Of course, UCLA also has students with higher gpa’s and higher class rank (~90% in top decile vs. 50% at Chapman); thus the ‘competition’ for A’s is much, much lower at Chapman.

great link, mikemac; thanks for posting it.