My son is about to go pre-med at a state flagship that also has it’s own medical school and hospitals. He takes the same pre-reqs that all bio and life science students take. Their selection of electives is more broad in the second year. Differentiation really begins at 3rd year where pre-med students begin taking classes at the medical school doing cool things like cadaver dissections (sorry - biologist here). I don’t think the early classes are extra difficult to weed out pre-meds. Maybe difficult enough to weed out ALL non-serious science majors. From my days, I recall organic chem was graded on a tremendous curve - you were thrilled to get a 60. Seems to be universal to this day. My wife taught undergrad microbiology at BU. She said the pre-meds there were ridiculous in that they wanted grades changed to A’s or explain away mistakes on tests (“you can see I had the correct answer the first time, I just accidentally erased it.” - yes this was really said). I guess pre-med attitude might might vary from school to school. I would suggest looking into a top state university that has a medical school and strong research program for additional opportunities like my son will receive. An additional comment made by my cardiologist: "Tell your son to go to the university where it is easiest to get a high GPA of 3.8+ because med schools are more worried about the number and less where it came from. He said the med school and your residency are how doctors are judged. He went to an ivy medical school and residency in Boston.