MIT vs. Princeton Pre-med (grade inflation)

sakky
Sat, 26 Jul 2008 14:50:59 +0000

But, if we were to compare apples to apples (a bio major at MIT to a bio major at Princeton, for example),



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.