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<p>And similarly, a guy with Asperger’s will probably get very high grades because, for the same reasons that such a guy can probably study hard and memorize a lot of facts (and not really care about partying and the college social scene) in order to do well on the MCAT, he can do the same to get high grades. </p>
<p>Hence, nobody is saying that you should rely solely on the MCAT. You would still have the interview. You would still have the essay. But those processes are fair too, in the sense that applicant who gets an interview at Harvard Medical School will be run through a process that he cannot control ex-ante. No applicant can ‘strategize’ by, say, specifically choosing the ‘easy’ interviewer in the way that a premed student can strategize by choosing easy classes. </p>
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<p>Well, right there is part of the problem: a lot of potential students don’t even apply because they know they won’t be able to get in. If you have a 30 MCAT, but a 2.3 GPA from Caltech, you probably won’t even apply to med-school. You know you won’t get in with those kinds of terrible grades, so why waste the time and money in applying? But that same student might have gotten a 3.3 GPA at some easy school (as well as the same 30 on the MCAT), and then he probably would have applied. In other words, plenty of people are eliminated before they even apply. Any study of the impacts of grade deflation would necessarily need to include them. </p>
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<p>Caltech and MIT are just the most obvious examples. Plenty of large public schools (i.e. Berkeley, Georgia Tech) are also noted for their grade deflation. </p>
<p>But like I said, the real problem is not so much between schools but rather between classes in the same school. Some profs who teach different sections of the very same class at the same school will nonetheless grade with very different curves. Hence, the strategy then is to figure out who the easy profs are and to take classes under them.</p>