<p>Call up UC Davis and ask for one of these charts:</p>
<p><a href=“Career Services | Student & Campus Life | Cornell University”>Career Services | Student & Campus Life | Cornell University;
<p>The only way to determine whether a 3.6 is harder to achieve at school X vs. school Y is to compare them to a standard (the MCAT).</p>
<p>Let’s look at Cornell:</p>
<p>It’s grade inflated (average GPA in the 3.3 range). But, there is very good evidence that it’s still a pretty tough school. 95 out of 267 med school applicants scored over a 35 (which is 95th percentile nationally) while only 29 had 3.9+ GPA’s. This means a lot of low GPA students at Cornell are scoring high on the MCAT. Nationally, a 3.6-3.7 GPA equates to a 30 MCAT. But, with Cornell, you can see that the median GPA for the 3.4-3.6 group is still well above a 30. The median MCAT of the 3.2-3.4 group is above a 30. Heck, the median MCAT of the 2.6-3.2 GPA people is still a 30. So, you can reasonably conclude that Cornell is tougher than your average school for premed.</p>
<p>Because the schools with grade inflation tend to have stronger students while schools with grade deflation tend to have weaker students (with a few exceptions), there’s no way to guess whether those factors balances out without a MCAT/GPA chart.</p>