Pre-Med at Illinois

drusba
Fri, 24 Feb 2006 09:00:46 +0000

Don’t know UIUC’s rate of admission to medical school but it sends about 200 graduates a year to medical school. Note, the flagship medical school for the University of Illinois system is the one at University of Illinois Chicago. The one at UIUC started as a branch of that one.

Pre-Med simply means you need to take the courses required to get into med school but it is not itself a major and thus you can’t view it as students trying to compete with each other because their actual majors vary and most won’t even know each other. Getting the high grades necessary for admission to med school is difficult for many, particularly in a number of courses. Organic Chemistry is a top weed-out course for med school wannabees – many switch planning to be doctors to planning to be something else as result of that course. Particularly in science and math courses, many profs do not use much of curve (I heard one math prof once joke that if he ever gets a class where all get all answers correct on all exams, he will curve so they all get C’s), and for organic chemistry you can usually find up to 35% of the students getting a D or F. Nevertheless, there are many who somehow find courses like that easy so how well you might do is just unknown.