I don’t want to bad mouth my alma mater. I agree that it isn’t cutthroat in terms of people literally cutting others throats or even sabotaging each other. However, doing homework together is a little shady, and says something about the environment that everyone is doing that. If you do the homework on your own, you probably wind up with low grades.
It might not be as bad as when I was there, but they eliminated the honor code because premeds were openly cheating in groups. Most of the premeds would forge their adviser’s signatures on their schedules because the advisers were not interested and the premeds would get informal peer advise on what classes they could get grades in. The faculty would teach classes in their research areas and it wasn’t really a clear progression of classes. I wasn’t sure what the premeds learned picking classes that way. Then, premeds with 4 years of German in high school got Ds in German I, which I guess was a big disaster for premeds. I don’t know why they were in German I to start with, but you couldn’t take introductory language without 3+ years of it is high school.
The school was really intense and there are a lot of good points. Part of the problem is that med schools don’t adjust their GPA requirements by school to the same level that graduate departments by subject do. It may have changed in the long time since I was there, but it wasn’t the easiest environment, cutthroat or not.