Heavily weeds: All schools weed. But Holy Cross has a rep for being particularly harsh in their weeding, including how they deny Committee Letters to certain students. I think HC also limits who can even declare that they’re premed.
AT ALL SCHOOLS, a huge number of incoming frosh want to be “premed”. Obviously, many/most are either not strong enough to actually make it thru the premed prereqs with med-school-worthy grades or they find out that they really don’t have the interest to become a physician.
The weeding process at ALL SCHOOLS begins frosh year. Premed prereqs and STEM majors are taking the same classes…bio, chem, etc. It is important to schools that the weaker kids NOT be passed along with good grades that they don’t deserve. This is done to encourage those kids to choose majors and career goals that are appropriate to their strengths. This is also done with engineering majors…that is why typically after frosh year, many premeds and eng’g majors suddenly have changed their career goals.
It is safe to say that at any school, about 75% of freshman premeds never apply to med school.
So, those Bio, Chem, etc classes typically strictly limit how many A’s will be awarded. Once a premed starts getting grades that he knows that aren’t med-school worthy, he will typically move on to something else. That is the weeding process.
A number of schools, including Alabama, write Committee Letters to med schools. Each school’s Committee is made up of faculty. These CL’s are written to help the student gain admission. There is first a Committee Interview, and then the Committee takes the LORs and info from the Interview to write the Letter which is sent to AMCAS (the med school app clearing house) and then forwarded to the med schools that the student has applied to.
Having a Committee Letter is a big plus. Your school is “vouching” for you, so to speak. many schools, particularly publics, don’t do this (the UCs do NOT), because it is a time-consuming and expensive process. Most of the top privates do write Committee Letters…check their premed websites to find out.
Anyway, Holy Cross is notorious about strictly limiting who can be premed, who they’ll write CL’s for, and who really has a chance to get into med school. If you don’t get a CL, then you might as well never apply to med school because the med schools will know that your school writes CLs yet they wouldn’t give you one.
Since it sounds like you would like to know more about the premed/med school app process, you can find out more here… http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-alabama/1609130-premed-at-bama-questions-ask-here-anyone-can-reply-p1.html and in the premed forum here on CC.