<p>as a commenter in that kevinMD article said, why are we grading on a curve? If the school doesn’t curve the nastiness drops precipitously.</p>
<p>While I fully agree with your first post kristin (that the difference between high and low ranked schools is who makes up the middle and bottom of the class, not the top of the class), I disagree with your assertion that science classes inherently have less flexibility in difficulty from institution to institution. To take my orgo class as an example, we always had 3 sections on our exams. Section A was full of straight forward questions testing random facts (e.g. what is electrophilic aromatic substitution). Section B was application of those facts to basic problems. Section C was application of those facts to advanced problems (e.g. draw out each step, including reagents, in the synthesis of Y from X where neither compound had been seen before). The MCAT was mostly on par with section A and maybe some section B problems, but nothing even remotely close to the difficulty of section C. My friends at other schools and students from other schools that I tutored did not experience problems like section C, and that is where the difference in science education can differ from one school to the next. Whether or not the top students are equivalent is irrelevant if the courses aren’t, and just because the facts are the same, the level of detail, the volume, and the way those facts are tested can yield completely different courses.</p>