I don’t know of any other US university that boasts a 92-95% medical school acceptance rate for a GPA range that encompasses 94% of the entire student body.
The publication I attached earlier was written by the Mignone Center for Career Success at Harvard University to advise potential Harvard pre-meds. Outsiders like me are not the intended audience.
“In recent years, Harvard students were admitted to medical school with equal or lower GPAs than national applicants. In a typical year, the admissions rate for Harvard applicants is in the range of 85 to 90%, and approximately 92-95% of applicants with GPAs above 3.5 are admitted.”
The above statement sounds very confident. There is no caveat that the incredibly high acceptance rates are only possible by demonstrating suitably high MCAT scores. In fact, there is very little mention about MCAT scores in the entire 16 page document. If the omission is unintentional, the career center is not doing a good job of advising its students.
There is insufficient information available in the public domain to make any definite conclusion. I just have suspicions.
The Harvard senior survey is probably higher than actual GPA due to self reporting; document is probably lower than actual GPA due to using earlier years, with less grade inflation; and there may be ways of fudging numbers such as how students who apply multiple times are handled. Ignoring that for a moment, let’s look at what the 2 documents imply the reported acceptance rate for Harvard applicants with <3.5 GPA is. I’ll assume acceptance rate is middle of listed range.
94% * 93.5% + 6% * x = 87.5%
x = (0.875 - 0.94 * 0.935) / 0.06
x = -0.065
Acceptance Rate = -6.5%
Note that the result is a negative acceptance rate. For the math to work out, >100% of <3.5 GPA applicants need to be rejected. It does not imply that <3.5 GPA applicants have a high acceptance rate. It certainly does not imply that the kid who is last in Harvard’s class has a good chance of being a doctor, which was the original tangent.
There are some Princeton info here with actual gpa/mcat scores.
They indicate “committee letter” though and the assumption is that the stats indicate those with letters. The range is still impressive. The admit rate is lower than Harvard’s. One can only guess how to correlate these and Harvard’s numbers.
[Actually it is unclear re: filtering of students. One of the slides does mention students w/o the committee letter or a postbacc, so they may or may not be included in the stats. A FAQ answer says that they will not withhold a committee letter even if they recommend the applicant should prepare more. Questions, questions.]
Sadly, yes. I spoke to a student that lost her merit that way. A more connected student, or one with involved parents, might have been able to negotiate with the school to avoid that situation.
A math professor I know had a student that failed his class. The student told his parents that the class was awful and everyone failed. The parents not only reached out to the professor and the school but threatened everyone with a lawsuit. The only problem? The kid was lying to his parents. The grade distribution was pretty standard for an intro math class.
I do not mean to cast any doubt on the particular student you referenced (about whom I know nothing and have no opinion), but I do think other stories of “everyone failing” get exaggerated to better justify poor grades.
The classes are curved. A 30% score as a mean sometimes converted to a B, sometimes to A-. This is how Duke was back when I went and how it is now. I loved those classes, even the ones that I started off below the mean and had to learn to navigate a different level of studying to get (eventually) way above the mean. This is how it is for my D21 and 23 at their T10s—it is supposed to feel hard and really stretch the brain. It is part of the fun and satisfaction of it all, and the majority of students adapt and (sometimes secretly) kind of like it. Humanities classes do not always have the same curves because it is mostly papers, but the reading load and expectations for papers are a different level, even when the same text is used as other colleges, due to cruising through the text in weeks not months then spending the rest of time on primary sources and current research debate.
I agree with you, there are some who do not thrive in that environment, but for the majority, having professors who teach the material at that level is quite an experience.
Source is The Daily Shot (market data subscription)
When I was going to school the joke was the hardest part of Harvard was getting in. This graph appears to show that . Some colleges (at least when I went) had a weed-them-out approach, while even then Harvard did not. Why the difference?
I prefer that an ungrad school tries to keep students enrolled and doing academically well as long as they are trying. You’ve accepted the student, what’s the point of them failing out? I graduated from a uni where the Engineers routinely struggled to maintain a 2.0. Not sure it did them much good long term IMO.
(CC says this graph was already shared, I don’t see it in the other posts, but apologies if I’ve missed it.)
The people bothered by grade inflation at fancy universities—really it’s the problem of grade compression—don’t want to fail people out.
They just want to get the lower (but non-failing) end of the scale back. So the students doing the least well would get Cs instead of B+s.
For various reasons, including the increasing tendency to treat students as customers (which they are) and future donors (which they are devoutly hoped to be), it is very hard to change this inflation or compression by sheer force, new rules, etc.—as it is hard to address real inflation that way.
Anyway, this discussion has drifted quite far from the SAT, into med school acceptances and sundry other topics. I can’t say I worry too much about grade inflation myself. There are reasons for it. And grades aren’t a very information-rich ranking system anyway—just what? 7 or 8 tiers if you start at C.
Students looking ahead to highly selective professional schools (e.g. medical or top 14 law) or first jobs that have a high GPA screen have incentive to prefer colleges with higher grade inflation. Colleges that want their graduates to succeed in getting to those post-graduation destinations (and increase the likelihood of earning more money to donate) have incentive to inflate grades for this reason.
Here’s a timely, related article from the most recent Harvard magazine:
I recently started using an application that tracks my work, producing weekly summaries of time spent on each activity, such as homework, socializing, or eating a meal. I was surprised to find I spend far, far less time on my classes than on my extracurricular activities—working as a research assistant, editing columns for the Crimson , or writing for Harvard Magazine . It turns out that I’m not alone in my meager coursework. Although the average college student spent around 25 hours a week studying in 1960, the average was closer to 15 hours in 2015.
But still, for many students, instead of being the core part of college, class is simply another item on their to-do list, no different from their consulting club presentation or their student newspaper article. Harvard has increasingly become a place in Cambridge for bright students to gather—that happens to offer lectures on the side.
Indeed, data from the Crimson’s senior survey indicates that students devote nearly as much time collectively to extracurriculars, athletics, and employment as to their classes.
Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education, made this point in a recent New York Times interview, saying that “Students feel the need to distinguish themselves outside the classroom because they are essentially indistinguishable inside the classroom.”
High school students, at least in some HSs, are likely behaving similarly, using ECs (and some likely using SAT/ACT scores) to help them distinguish themselves.
+1 with anecdotal ‘evidence’ confirming there’s a significant difference in rigor between schools.
The varying levels Data10 referred to at elite schools really only applies to first year general institute requirements. Upper level classes in your major do not offer varying levels.
My student has taken classes at our state flagship, a local 4-year private, and at MIT.
Classes may have the same name at different schools, but the curriculum is vastly different. “Intro to Bio” at MIT covered two full semesters of our state flagship bio in three weeks. The remainder of the semester in MIT “Intro” to bio was full speed ahead.
Among MIT students, Harvard is known to unapologetically inflate grades. MIT students will cross register at Harvard for easy A’s to bring up their GPA.
“This fall, one of my friends did not attend a single lecture or class section until more than a month into the semester. Another spent 40 to 80 hours a week on her preprofessional club, leaving barely any time for school. A third launched a startup while enrolled, leaving studying by the wayside.”
“HALF OF THE BLAME can be assigned to grade inflation, which has fundamentally changed students’ incentives during the past several decades. Rising grades permit mediocre work to be scored highly, and students have reacted by scaling back academic effort. I can’t count the number of times I’ve guiltily turned in work far below my best, betting that the assignment will nonetheless receive high marks.”
This article seems to be at odds with the notion that many elite schools have classes with increased rigor and extremely low means on exams. I guess a lot of this dependent on your school and your major.
[aside]
No they are not, nor should they be. This is a destructive attitude, since it means that students should automatically get a degree as long as they are accepted and pay tuition. A customer is somebody who buys goods or property. If a student is a customer, then they are, by definition, buying a degree, and the fact that they failed at every class does not change the fact that they have paid for something and therefore they deserve to get that something. If you say that they are paying for an education that means that they are entitled to walk away with an education, no matter what they did or didn’t do.
Since you cannot “buy” an education any more than you can “buy” expertise on the piano or a win at a trial, and similar to the fact that you cannot buy the title of “master carpenter”, you cannot buy a degree. That means that that a student is NOT a customer.
A student is, paying for the faculty’s time, and the use of the space and facilities at the university, and for the opportunity to interact with other student. That makes them a client, since they are paying for services, similar to when a person pays a lawyer to represent them.
A student deserves access to facilities, and they deserve a certain amount of tine from faculty. That is what they are paying for.
[/aside]
Long ago, there was a CC poster who discussed taking classes at Bryn Mawr and then after a transfer at Harvard (Japanese if I recall correctly). She remarked about the large (2x ?) difference in pacing between the two schools.
Many classes at Harvard are certainly easy, but some are more difficult than their MIT equivalents, such as Math 55 and Physics 16. However, those are not available for cross-registration.
For CS classes, they seemed to be equal in difficulty, but MIT’s were generally taught better.
I would presume cross registration happens with lower level classes, rather than upper level.
My student would disagree on CS equivalencies. I distinctly recall them commenting that Harvard students were openly protesting in the class piazza regarding the rigor & grading of a 1st or 2nd year level CS course stating “this is the hardest class I have taken ever!” Meanwhile the MIT kids are looking at eachother in disbelief. Note the Wellesley students in the class were doing just fine.
I’m sure social science classes at Harvard exceed the rigor of MIT ss.
The education market has transitioned this way and has become transactional. Many students and parents believe they are customers and behave that way, as much as some of us wish that weren’t true.
. Some colleges (at least when I went) had a weed-them-out approach, while even then Harvard did not. Why the difference?