MIT vs. Princeton Pre-med (grade inflation)

norcalguy
Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:26:59 +0000

But why do we need to make that kind of comparison? Premeds can come from any major.

In fact, that alone is probably a good reason to believe that Princeton is more grade-inflated for premed. If, for no other reason, you have a wider variety of easier humanities majors at Princeton than at MIT, and I think there is little dispute that, in general, humanities majors tend to grade easier than do technical majors. {For example, it’s practically impossible to actually fail a humanities course as long as you do the work, but you can do all the work and still fail an engineering course.} In other words, a Princeton premed has more opportunities to load up on easier courses than does an MIT premed.

I’ll give you another reason: MIT has more requirements. No matter what you major in at MIT, whether you like it or not, you have to complete the General Institute Requirements, which includes, among other things, multivariable calculus. Premeds at other schools like Princeton are not required to take multivariable calculus unless their major demands them to do so, and those who don’t want to can simply choose a major that does not have such a requirement. Heck, some med schools such as UCSF don’t require that you take any calculus whatsoever. But MIT makes you take calculus up to the multivariable level whether you like it or not. I doubt that too many people would say that calculus at MIT is easy. Hence, right there is another reason to suspect that MIT will be more difficult.



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. Presumably, a student who would choose to major in bio at Princeton would major in bio at MIT too. I agree with you that it’s probably a little easier to take humanities courses at Princeton but there are the usual humanities/social sciences departments at MIT (probably with a smaller course selection). 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. Going from engineering at MIT to engineering at Princeton isn’t going to make their lives easier.

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).