@artloversplus fair point. I honestly don’t know much about the deflation at UC apart from what wifey tells me. But she made it sound brutal.
I briefly was appointed as a rep on the admissions committee for a very well known private medical school, so I do know what I’m talking about. During committee rounds, there were students applying from hundreds of schools. It was impossible to keep track of which was prestigious and had deflation vs those who weren’t. The great equalizer was the MCAT score. I paid little attention to the prestigious schools vs the non-prestigious ones. The admissions deans didn’t either. Most were busy MDs with academic appointments who had little time for hair-splitting. So most of the committee discussions boiled down to the grades, plain and simple.
I can tell you based on my experience a 4.0/32+ MCAT from a top state school got my attention. Much more so than a 3.5 kid from Princeton or Stanford. Finishing med school is tough. We never wanted to admit someone who would struggle. Med school involves a lot of grunt work, and hence GPA matters a lot. There were plenty of brainiac kids who were good test takers (high MCAT), but couldn’t get enough As. This worried me if there were Bs in classes heavy on memorization like Orgo. I had no way of knowing if the prof was a goon, or if the kid didn’t know how to memorize. But in the end, it rarely mattered. Only those with high GPAs made the first cut. Exceptions were given for kids with exceptional circumstances (URM, switching careers, etc). But getting a high GPA is paramount, I can’t stress it enough.