<p>D2 attended a JHU peer school. There’s poster here whose son is a JHU student.</p>
<p>Grade deflation, per se, isn’t so much the issue at schools like these, but rather that you have have lots** of smart, very motivated pre meds and only a limited of number of As available. (20% is typical). This means that the competition for those limited As tends to be fierce. </p>
<p>**At D2’s uni and at JHU, between 30-40% of all incoming freshmen are “pre-meds”. That’s a lot of pre meds that you’ll be competing against.</p>
<p>These schools have, needless to say, pretty big attrition rates among pre meds. 75-85% is pretty common.</p>
<p>The other issue is the committee letter. You need to look closely at the individual school’s policy for issuing a committee for health professions applicants. Some schools will limit committee letters to only those applicants whom they feel have the very best chances of gaining a med acceptance. (JHU has a reputation for being particularly harsh in this area, but, to be fair, there are plenty of upper tier colleges that do the same thing.) This means a good, but not excellent, candidate will be prevented from applying. No committee letter is a huge red flag on your application. It can prevent your app from getting serious consideration from adcomms. (Cynically speaking this is how X university can claim that 85% of its pre med applicants get accepted to medical school. Because they don’t allow weaker applicants to apply.)</p>
<p>BTW, except for a small handful of tippy top schools (HYPS), don’t expect to get any consideration from med school adcomms w/r/t your GPA. Even then the amount to consideration you’ll get is tiny–on the order of .1-.2 added to your GPA. Not really enough to redeem a mediocre GPA.</p>
<p>Applicants do not get their GPA “adjusted” because they attended an intense undergrad or had a “hard” major. (Math, engineering, physics, comp sci, or whatever you consider “hard”.) Fact of life in the med admissions process.</p>