MIT vs. Princeton Pre-med (grade inflation)

sakky
Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:54:01 +0000

I’m not sure if a policy where there are 35% A’s qualifies as grade deflation.



Yeah, exactly. I, for one, would have loved to have attended an undergrad program that gave out 35% A’s. That would have been like manna in heaven.



We have to make that comparison because someone isn’t going to major in anthro at Princeton but choose to major in mechanical engineering at MIT.



Actually, I would have to disagree. I believe that choice of major is indeed greatly affected by your school’s environment. Let’s be honest: most incoming students don’t really know what they want to major in. In fact, that’s precisely why most schools allow students to shop around and try on different majors before they finally have to settle on one. For example, at MIT, you aren’t required to declare your major until the end of your second year. Why provide such flexibility if students already know what they’re going to major in?

What actually happens is that students come into a school and try on different classes and talk to different students, and then decide what they want to major in. But that choice is of course strongly affected by the available courses (and how attractive they are) and the general culture of the school. MIT is obviously a huge and prominent engineering school and so it is natural for otherwise-undecided students to be swept into engineering. Similarly, other schools like Princeton have strong anthro offerings and so will tend to attract students into anthro.

This seems to be especially true for the majors you mentioned: anthro and mechanical engineering. I don’t know what kind of high school that others went to, but mine certainly didn’t offer MechE or anthro courses. Hence, I didn’t know what either of these disciplines really entailed until I went to college and was actually able to take courses in them.

But think about what that means. If your college doesn’t even offer courses in anthro - and MIT does not - then that means that you’re obviously not going to choose anthro as a major, but if you had gone to another school that did offer anthro, then you might have chosen anthro. In other words, your choice of major is actually *endogenous * to the college that you go to. For example, I know several people who went to the University of Delaware on scholarship and they all ended majoring in chemical engineering for the simple reason that ChemE is arguably the most prominent department at Delaware, and that departmental strength attracted them. But they freely admitted that if they had gone to another school, they probably wouldn’t have majored in ChemE.



Going from engineering at MIT to engineering at Princeton isn’t going to make their lives easier.



See above. That guy may not be an engineer if he had gone to Princeton.



But, what I’ve noticed about engineers is that a) they don’t want to take humanities courses and b) they’re often not good at it.



Then we seem to have noticed opposite things. Every engineering student I know loves to take humanities courses, for the simple reason that they tend to be easy (at least, relative to engineering courses) and consequently are seen as “GPA-boosters”. For example, I distinctly remember one of my old buddies, coming into his final semester before graduation, and whose GPA was just slightly below what he needed to graduate with honors, who decided to absolutely load up on humanities classes. I think he had only 1 engineering class left to complete, and he ‘supplemented’ them with something like 4 or 5 humanities courses. It worked too: he got all A’s in those humanities courses and he did indeed graduate with honors. He told me afterwards that his that one last engineering course made him work harder than all of those humanities courses combined. Not only that, he still ended up with a lower grade in that engineering course than in those humanities courses. Nevertheless, he got what he wanted, which was to (barely) make the honors cutoff.

Besides, even if what you are saying is correct, we can look at the situation the other way. You might say that engineers don’t like and aren’t good at humanities courses. But then, I could say that humanities students really don’t like and aren’t good at engineering courses. Never in my life have I ever heard of a humanities student deciding he is going to take a bunch of engineering classes just because he is looking for easy “GPA-boosters”.



I took a look at MIT’s requirements. Outside of multivariable calc, I see nothing too onerous. In fact, for a science major premed (which make up 70-80% of all premeds), I think it’s actually a blessing to have writing/humanties/social science requirements as it will ensure that the science major has enough humanities courses (JHU/USC require 24 semester credits’ worth).



I don’t see how any extra requirements of any kind can be considered a ‘blessing’. After all, how people are really going to be going to JHU or USC for med schools? Hence, what about those med schools that don’t require humanities/social science courses? You are therefore forced to take classes that you may not need.

Note, to be sure, I am not saying that nobody should take these courses. What I am saying is that it should be a choice. You shouldn’t force people to take extra courses that they don’t really want to take and may not be good at.



for what its worth, when the dean of HMS came to speak at Princeton last year, he assured the worried crowd that Harvard was very much aware of the grade deflation at Princeton and made reasonable accommodations for it.



HMS, sure. But how many people can go to HMS? Let’s face it. Most med schools are not at the level of HMS. They probably don’t know - and won’t care - about Princeton’s new grading policy. All they will see is that Princeton’s premeds seem to have lower GPA’s than the ones coming out of HYS and they won’t know or care why.

*The grade deflation policy remains in effect for both courses, and while it is harder to fail a humanities class, it is equally harder to score high 90’s. *

The most important aspect is the former: that it is simply harder to fail a humanities class. After all, the grading goal of a premed is not really trying to good grades. Not exactly. The real goal is actually to avoid bad grades. Getting a C is a problem and anything below that is really going to kill you. Yet I think there is little dispute that you are far more likely to get such bad grades in engineering courses than in humanities courses.

Which leads to a point I have made on CC several times: when it comes to being a premed, it is better to not take a difficult class at all, than to take it and get a poor grade. Sad but true. In other words, you have to protect your GPA, and it is far easier to do that in certain disciplines than in others.