Who said 1500 has to be the Top 25% and 1200 has to be the bottom 25%? I certainly didn’t.
I’m saying of the pre-med wannabes I know the vast majority of those who have successfully gotten into med school went to a school where their SAT and GPA were both in the Top 25% of students going to that school. Students who came back and reported switching out (usually freshman year) due to academics (vs merely wanting something different) went to schools where they were not in the Top 25%. Then I added that you can eliminate the Tippy Top schools (Top 20) from that. The students from our school who go to those schools are Tippy Top students, but I don’t know that they’re “perfect” on the SAT if that’s the criteria for Top 25%. (For Stanford College Board says it’s 1570.)
Consider Pittsburgh (a place many of ours go to). Their Top 25% is listed at 1430. If our student has that score or higher (preferably higher) they will likely get into med school if they don’t change their mind. If they have a 1350 I’d place my bets otherwise. The same 1350 student going to Washington & Jefferson (Top 25% at 1320) would probably make it. Ditto with Bloomsburg (a commonly attended state school - Top 25% at 1150). There are several choices they can look at for fit, etc. Pitt just isn’t one I’d suggest based upon what I’ve seen happen, though I often recommend Pitt if the student is in the range. The 1500 student can do fine anywhere, but they tend to enjoy being with academic peers. Pitt has more.
Creekland, you are a miracle worker if you are seeing kids get into med school starting out with 1150 SAT scores. There’s a huge, huge jump required for those kids to be competitive by MCAT time, and for those kids to do well in Orgo.
@blossom I don’t know about 1150. That’s just the Top 25% score for Bloomsburg according to college board. Most I know heading the med school route have 1200+ (usually higher). 1300+ is considered a really good score at our school though. Higher than 1400 is very rare, but happens sometimes. Not all of our high scores go the med school route, of course.
I’m also not the miracle worker… but I do get to see most of the seniors, esp on the academic track, to talk with them about what their plans are and many return to school when they’re back home to share. If they don’t share with me themselves, other teachers share what they heard about who’s doing what and/or there are siblings.
Regarding med school, since I have a son currently in it I’ve more or less become the “expert” on it (for students) even though I’m not really in that category by my job or experience (aside from my son’s experience). I try to read the Pre-Med forum here to keep up my own knowledge on parts and then stay aware of what has happened with others in order to share.
If a school is an average public school, many kids getting 1200 + scores may be quite capable students. Excessive test prep by kids in more affluent publics or privates can inflate their scores in many instances .
You mentioned the problem is keeping up with 1500 score students in the class, which implies you need to have a significant number of 1500 score students. If I assume a normal distribution of scores in your Pitt example, then less than <2% of students in the A&S college would have a 1500+ score, so this would not be a good example of 1200 scores and 1500 scores.
You are making sweeping generalizations based on what I expect is very limited and non-random anecdotal examples from kids at a single HS. Studies with appropriate controls consistently find that combined SAT score alone only explains a small portion of variance in nearly any college performance metric. The vast majority of variance depends on other factors. If you compare students with the same combined SAT scores and instead only vary combined SAT scores of other members of the class, I’d expect the predictive ability to become even smaller.
I’m sure Pitt is the better choice for some pre-med kids with 1350 SAT score, while Washington & Jefferson is a better choice for others. There are many important considerations besides combined SAT score. For example, Washington & Jefferson reports that rejected allopathic med school applicants had the same mean GPA as accepted allopathic med school applicants at Pitt. W&J accepted allopathic med schools had mean college GPA of 3.8, which would put them right at the top of the class and well above Pitt’s mean. W&J accepted students had a mean MCAT was >510, which is also quite high. Based on the stat distribution, they W&J appears to be discouraging a large portion of students from applying and/or has heavy “weeding.” I know little about the college, but some of these factors are not what I’d look for in a pre-med program.
So, if you had a child score a 25 on the ACT without private tutoring, has a 3.6 and a challenging academic path in a very highly regarded school district (12th in the state), but not from an affluent family(middle class). Kid will get academic money(though just a little and athletic scholarship money) by attending Bloomsburg…based on Creek’s scenario…does this kid have a chance to get to Med School?
My logic says Bloomsburg is a no brainer…can graduate with little debt, good college experience, can be a big fish. It makes me nuts how we label kids coming out of school based on perhaps less support than the social elite, even before they have had their 1st true college class. College shaming is just as bad if not worse than body shaming. It impacts mental health, judgement and both student and family resources including financial futures.
That kid lives in my house and she has grit. Not sure that shows up as a measurable stat…no matter what high school counselors say. Can’t pay a tutor to teach grit.
Guess I am not a fan of labels…no matter how hard the high school administrators try to do so.
Just as a sidebar, I’ll note that SAT/ACT scores do correlate with first-year college grades, but it’s a quite weak correlation. The single best predictor of first-year college grades continues to be high school GPA, and that appears to be true regardless of perceived high school rigor or average GPA of the high school itself.
Worth noting, though: As yet, we do not have an even weakly reliable pre-college predictor of grades beyond the first year of college.
This was totally me in my career and my MBA program. I worked in finance/investment management. Didn’t have a finance or business undergrad, unlike most of my peers. Went back to business school eventually and it was a cakewalk. Plenty of them were strong in math but lacked the complete package to really kick butt in the industry. Mind you, all were doing fine, $$$ wise. Anecdotal, I know, but not unusual for many high achievers to not have a STEM/math major. I know guys who pulled in 7 figures a year with Buddhist Studies, English, and Latin American Studies majors.
Agree with @Data10’s points about lopsided GPAs. I have one of those kids. Went to and academically rigorous LAC and did just fine with a below average and lopsided SAT score. Colleges realize students have areas of strength and weakness and can really excel in their areas of strength. That’s a good thing.
"Financial analysis- it uses 10th grade math. My brilliant, mathy, overprepared classmates often did not do as well as I did. "
“Operations Management-- one of the “mathier” requirements in the B-school curriculum”
Are these core classes because I also went to b-school and the engineers placed out of the core operations management, information systems, probability courses. Similar to finance majors placing out of the intro to financial analysis class.
I don’t want to get into stem vs non-stem, but me and the other engineer in the group pretty much did the number crunching for projects, where the group had humanities, econ etc. majors. The best groups of course had contributions from everyone and we didn’t go around comparing ourselves since it was a group grade.
The information in that article doesn’t match the headline, once you make it past the anecdotes.
This $81,200 mid-career earnings sounds good, until you read further down in the article and it says the 30-49 year old workers with a philosophy degree have median earnings of $51,000. No attempt is made to explain why one number is 60% higher than the other. I’ll believe the American Community Survey data is more comprehensive and accurate than the WSJ PayScale data.
College board reports Pitt’s Top 25% to be at 1430/33 with 42% getting >700 in math and 28% in English. I suppose they could have <2% with 1500 or higher, but I know our higher scoring students enjoy the place and find peers - esp compared to other schools with lower “top” percentages.
For the rest, I’m back to letting the reader decide. We could probably endlessly debate, but we’ll never change each other’s mind and it’s probably boring many. Yes, my data is from one statistically average high school. It includes both SAT and GPA (few take the ACT). And yes, kids with 1200+ have made it into med school if they chose a school where they weren’t discouraged by the level others start at (foundational level entering classes) and had the rest of the package in what they did in college.
And I should repeat that some of them dropping from the med school route doesn’t mean they then did awful in college and didn’t graduate. These kids do well in other fields. I still think if they had chosen other schools they wouldn’t have been discouraged about their ability, but real life doesn’t let us have redos so who knows? Similar students make it just fine in other schools.
Personally I think Bloomsburg would be a good place to give it a try. They’d be in the bottom 25% if choosing Pitt, top 25% at Bloomsburg. The MCAT is the same. Orgo will still be challenging. But for many students feeling they are equally as prepared as their peers to tackle the subjects gives them the confidence they need. Feeling they aren’t makes them think they are “dumb” since “everyone else already seems to know” and is discouraging. I personally think most are just as smart/capable - it’s just the foundation at the beginning that is different. But that’s coming from my school where 1200+ is a good score. If it were a mediocre score I’m not sure it’s just the foundation. I don’t have those data points IRL.
@blossom Believe it or not I actually agree much with what you are saying. I suspect the law prof does too.
The point of the hypothesis, however, is not to speculate on his opinion (or mine), but to replicate his opinion as expressed in his article, and in his 3 step guide to financial self-sufficiency for college freshman as simply and as accurately as possible. Nowhere in his article did he talk about what you were saying. Rightly or wrongly, what you have to say is not relevant to his article, and I will not put words in his mouth. His article is well written with a lot of interesting factoids, but I suspect the verbiage may obfuscate the crux of the article, which is the 3 step guide.
@gwnorth Toronto Star had a fascinating story on grading in Ontario universities. I posted it on CC before but I could not find it last time I looked on the web. If your local library keep old copies, you may be in luck. It is the Nov 24, 2003 story, titled “Marks jolt the double cohort” by Louise Brown.
It was mentioned that the average student in Toronto gets a C+ to B- average at the end of the first year. Mrs Canuck told me that the school also restricts the number of As given in large classes to 20% of the cohort. My kids’ business school is more generous, up to 25% of the class may be given an A.
Grading is a pet peeve of mine. I think it is unfair and arbitrary. This article gives a very good rundown of the problem:
What? You mean that all the teenagers posting on CC about what their future lives will be might be making the wrong predictions? And then to go further and say that that’s actually okay? Say it ain’t so!
I remember on one of my kids’ schools senior nights, more than 1/2 the kids listed engineering or pre-med/med school in terms of majors/plans. Ultimately that isn’t going to be the case but no one calls anyone on that (nor should they). And in the end, the kids find their way and do fine.
It seems extremely implausible that any college offering significant merit for tippy top students (like Pitt) would have a normal distribution of scores. Instead there is likely to be a much fatter tail at the high end of the distribution. For example my D’s college has a 25/75 ACT range of 22-29 but definitely has >2% of students with a 34+. I don’t have any specific data on exact numbers, but would estimate 3-4%, since ~1% are NMFs and they give full tuition or better scholarships to at least 3% of the entering class with a cutoff of ~33 for instate and ~34-35 for out of state.
I read an article a while back commenting on the review that was done by Queen’s University’s faculty of Arts & Sciences of the grading practices of it’s various departments -
If the results hold true for other schools, all the pre-med want-to-be’s at DS’s school should consider switching from Life Sciences to Classics (I’m just being facetious. I’m not suggesting that all that would be required to get an A in Classics would be to just show up. I am not dismissing the need for a base strength in writing and non-quantitative analytical skills).
Anecdotally DS took a Classics course this past semester and I expected it to be his lowest grade given the difference in his results in high school between his science and math courses vs humanities and social sciences. I assumed that like in high school it would be easier for him to score better in non-subjective science and math courses, but he did better in his Classics course than he did in grade 12 English. We’ll see if the pattern holds true with his History course this semester too. Either his high school English teachers graded uncommonly harshly or certain introductory humanities courses are very generous with their grading scale. In any case his success in his Classics class has not persuaded him to change his intended major and the chair of the Physics department that sent him what was in essence a recruiting letter can rest easy that he will not be losing DS to the Classics department (or Chemistry or Math for that matter).