<p>No, it is natural self-selection. MIT students that are interested in being premed do not have any serious difficulty keeping a decent GPA. </p>
<p>There is serious grade deflation in some of the engineering departments, but very few engineers are ever interested in being premed. Management majors also have on average lower GPAs but they did not graduate from Sloan to become premed. Also a low GPA in engineering (or management) has little to no effect on outcome after graduation. </p>
<p>The few low GPA premeds are nearly all in engineering departments such as ChemE and MechE. In the science departments (biology, neuroscience, physics, mathematics…) there is less grade deflation and you can compensate an occasional bade grade with research credits which are pretty much automatic As. Biochem and organic chem courses are notoriously tough at MIT, but you can always take those classes at Harvard, which does have serious grade inflation. </p>
<p>For some reason, 2/3 of premeds at MIT are female and they also tend to have higher GPA on average. The one sure way to kill your GPA at MIT is taking on too much work. There is only so many hours in the day and there are simply no easy classes. You can take challenging courses as exploratory (drop the class after the final) and all classes have very late drop dates, so you can somewhat control the downside.</p>