Do admissions officers know about Cal's grade deflation?

sakky
Fri, 22 Apr 2011 12:16:14 +0000

Well in transfers, colleges consider the prestige of a university in deciding if they will give transfer credit. And I know for a fact that AOs consider the rigor of a high school during freshman admissions, so why would grad not consider the the grade deflation of a college? I mean lets say I got a 3.6 at berkeley and a 14 (is the MCAT score a range from 1-15? I’m not doing premed so I don’t really know) but got a 4.0 and a 12 at Stanford. Since Stanford has grade inflation on par with the Ivies, won’t med schools consider that the Berkeley kids had to compete with more, but see that he is as qualified due to his MCAT?



Carefully consider the following quote. It was, interestingly enough, written for premeds at Stanford, but the lessons surely apply even more saliently to premeds at Berkeley.

*…It is true that it is more difficult to get
an A in a Stanford pre-med class than it is at most other
schools. This is easier to understand since you are
graded on a curve with some of America’s best students.
Consequently, an ‘A’ at Stanford can mean a lot,
particularly in science classes with a ‘C’ mean.

However, most of you won’t get A’s in every
class. And because of this, some of you certainly
would have had higher GPA’s elsewhere. It is also true
that medical school know this and will take it into account.
However, this ‘forgiveness factor’ is not infinite.
Getting a 4.0 in your pre-med requirements at a
junior college will certainly make you a stronger applicant
than a 3.5 in your pre-med requirements at Stanford.

One admissions officer I spoke with estimated
the bump factor of attending a school like Harvard or
Stanford to be between 0.3 and 0.5 of a grade point.
For some of you, an ‘A’ in high school could
be achieved through hard work and determination.
This is not necessarily true of the pre-med classes at
Stanford. Everyone is trying hard. They are all smart.
And the classes can be very difficult.

The upshot of all of this is that some of you
may be more successful applying to medical school by
taking most of your pre-med classes elsewhere. And I
have certainly known many applicants who would have
been more successful applying to medical school if they
had pursued their academic passions at Stanford and
took their pre-med classes elsewhere, either in summers
or in a year off. I have also known students at Stanford—
who would have been fantastic physicians—who
quit the pre-med process in frustration without exploring
this option.*

http://www.questscholars.org/oldstuff/activities/professional/pre-med_letter/premed-letter-2001-2-pdf.pdf

To be clear, this document was written by a former Stanford premed who won a Rhodes Scholarship, then earned his MD and serves on the faculty at UCSF, and also runs an NGO that helps students prepare for careers in medicine.