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Then are you suggesting that GPA should not be a major factor in admission?</p>
<p>On a minor note, I’d also like to echo lollybo’s earlier statement that Orgo is not memorization at all. I probably would have gotten a C or a D if I’d tried to memorize my way through that class. It is a class that requires one to understand principles and concepts, to deduce and analyze, not memorize.</p>
<p>From Academic Medicine. 74(11):1217-21.</p>
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[ACADEMIC</a> MEDICINE - Abstract: Volume 74(11) November 1999 p 1217-21 The plight of premedical education: myths and misperceptions-Part II: science “versus” the liberal arts.](<a href=“The plight of premedical education: myths and misperceptions... : Academic Medicine”>The plight of premedical education: myths and misperceptions... : Academic Medicine)</p>
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[ACADEMIC</a> MEDICINE - Abstract: Volume 71(8) August 1996 p 920-2 Preclinical science course “preludes” taken by premedical students: do they provide a competitive advantage?.](<a href=“Preclinical science course “preludes” taken by premedical st... : Academic Medicine”>Preclinical science course “preludes” taken by premedical st... : Academic Medicine)</p>
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<p>Frankly, yes, that is what I am suggesting, and it is something that I have suggested on other threads. The major problem with GPA’s is simple: different schools (and even different profs within the same school) use different grading schemes. Is a C from MIT equivalent to an A from SE Missouri State University? Who knows? Hence, GPA’s are a noisy and unreliable signal.</p>
<p>The saddest part of using GPA as a major criteria is simple: it simply encourages students to play the sad but rational game of searching for easy classes and easy profs, for I’m sure we’ve all seen that, even within the same school, some classes are graded easier than others. Right now at it stands, the process doesn’t really reward knowledge. It rewards grades, which is not the same thing. Hence, premeds are rationally incentivized to get high grades, with actual knowledge development being only a secondary consideration. </p>
<p>I think GPA should be replaced with the MCAT. If the problem is that the MCAT doesn’t test on enough subjects, then the answer is to make a better MCAT. The advantage of the MCAT is that it is a standardized and fair test that every premed has to take, hence reducing the statistical variation. Hence, you’ll no longer have premeds playing the game of searching for easy classes to rack up a bunch of easy A’s, because at the end of the day, you’ll either know the material to do well on the MCAT, or you won’t. </p>
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<p>Well, I’ve done OChem too, and I certainly recall a lot of memorization necessary. Not that I’m complaining, as I’m pretty good at that and hence I got high grades.</p>
<p>But that’s beside the point. The real point is, again, for the purposes of med-school admissions, why is OChem considered so special? Why are premeds forced to learn reactions that they will never use? Again, to quote Dean Alpern: "“In my many years of medicine, I have never heard the Diels-Alder reaction mentioned once,”. So why force them to learn it?</p>
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<p>Why learn anything during an undergrad education? Why should one take literature classes, because Medical schools do not care if you know anything about Shakespeare? Why take history classes, when you will never hear about the Byzantine Empire after you graduate? Why take philosophy classes, when medical schools don’t care about Kant?</p>
<p>I think the primary purpose of undergrad is to make you a good thinker, medical schools will take care of the knowledge aspect. Ochem teaches the foundations of science that medical schools will build upon.</p>
<p>Sakky,</p>
<p>Although MCATs is the only index for a standardized evaluation of one’s knowledge, I believe that GPA is also necessary… Why? Because GPA is the only index that provides information to Adcoms about a student’s consistency, persistence, perseverence, and goal-oriented behavior - characteristics that are incredibly valuable to being successful in a protracted study of Medicine.</p>
<p>The GPA-free formula does have appeal: a super MCAT and a minimum value published by each medical school to determine admission status. Effect of any systematic admissions bias could be measured by a deviation above or below the median.</p>
<p>Early or soft pre-meds could take the test as sophomores to get meaningful feedback on their chances.</p>
<p>Competency in core subjects guaranteed (or at least assessed objectively).</p>
<p>Prestige out.
“Special circumstances” out, or at least quantified exactly.
URM status out, or at least quantified exactly.</p>
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<p>I said it before, and I’ll say it again. European students can start medical programs straight out of high school. Students in Japan do the same. I am not aware of any evidence whatsoever that European or Japanese doctors know less or provide worse care than do US doctors - if anything, their health care systems actually seem to perform better than does the US system (although, granted, that also has to do with institutional factors such as universal health care and lower rates of violent crime). Nevertheless, foreign doctors are living proof that you can provide perfectly good medical care without having received the ‘benefits’ of a standalone undergrad education. </p>
<p>Personally, I suspect this is all a matter of rent-seeking on the part of the AMA: they want a medical career to be more difficult than it needs to be because doing so cuts down on the competition and hence keeps salaries up. The AMA is simply imposing an extra cost on society by forcing students to not only pay for 4 years of undergrad education that they probably don’t need but also to stay out of the workforce for those years, but the AMA obviously doesn’t care because they’re not bearing the cost. If French, British, German, or Japanese doctors seem to provide an equivalent or better quality of care than do US doctors without needing a standalone undergrad education, the AMA doesn’t really seem to care about that. Is there really any credible evidence that demonstrates that US doctors are more knowledgeable than doctors from those other countries? I am not aware of any. </p>
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<p>But again, it doesn’t really measure those things. Not exactly. GPA is a distorted signal because it also includes other factors such as:</p>
<p>*One’s ability to ‘strategize’ by searching for easy classes taught by easy profs. Put another way, it also measures one’s ability to play the sad (but rational) game of avoiding difficult classes for fear of getting a bad grade. Like I’ve said before, it’s better not to take a difficult class at all than to take it and get a bad grade. {Obviously if you can take a difficult class and get a good grade then that would be the optimal outcome, but the upside is clearly outweighed by the downside and hence the rational and risk-averse response is to simply not try at all.} But are those the kinds of people you want to reward: those who don’t dare try to do difficult things because they might do poorly? Yet that is precisely what the med-school admissions process rewards. </p>
<p>*As a corollary to the above, you end up inducing people to prefer easy majors at easy, grade-inflated schools because that’s where they know they can get good grades. As I’m sure we all know, some majors require less work and grade easier than others, and some schools grade easier than other schools. Students rationally figure why should they work hard if they don’t have to? Why not just go to the easier school and major in something easy in order to play the “GPA-protection” game. </p>
<p>*People who take classes on topics that they already know. I know people who were completely fluent in a foreign language, yet decided to take the intro series to that language anyway, just to get a string of easy A’s. Clearly that has nothing to do with perseverance or persistence.</p>
<p>In short, by fixating on grades, med-school adcoms simply encourage premeds to game the system, in which the game doesn’t really reward knowledge or persistence, but rather rewards good grades, which is not the same thing. There are numerous ways, only a few of which I have enumerated, to get good grades without gaining knowledge or without working persistently.</p>
<p>Which is why I prefer the notion of relying on MCAT scores in lieu of GPA. The MCAT is fair: there are no advantages associated with going to an easy, grade-inflated school or choosing an easy major. There would be no point in trying to ‘game’ your GPA. Everybody would take the same test and be judged fairly. If the problem is that the MCAT doesn’t test certain topics properly, then the real answer is to make the MCAT better. </p>
<p>Note, you can still include other factors in determining admission, such as interviews, essays, LOR’s, and so forth. However, by removing GPA as a consideration, you remove a source of distortion and hence eliminate the GPA gaming that occurs.</p>
<p>But isn’t the BCPM GPA a more relevant GPA for Adcoms? I would think that other electives are not as important for admissions purposes as the BCPM core courses. </p>
<p>Every PreMed has to complete 1 year of Bio, Physics, Math, and Chem whether or not they take other grade-inflating courses.</p>
<p>So, yes, the “gaming of GPA” can occur in the overall GPA, but less so in BCPM, I would think. Besides, if they “game” the system even in BCPM, they will likely get a far lower score in MCATs. </p>
<p>Reg LORs - these too can be biased toward certain “favorite students”. I can imagine scenarios where male Profs may give better LORs to female students they have a special connection with.</p>
<p>yeah… i think BCPM is much harder to “game” than others</p>
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<p>Perhaps harder to game, but still quite game-able. Arguably the easiest way to ‘game’ the system is to simply avoid going to certain schools that are known for being quite difficult, i.e. MIT or Caltech in favor of other schools that are quite infamous for grade inflation, i.e. Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. {Note, while it’s still difficult to get an A at those schools, it’s practically impossible to get a truly terrible grade as long as you put in a bare minimum of effort, whereas at schools like MIT or Caltech, you can work extremely hard and still get a terrible grade.} </p>
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<p>But then that’s just a reason to support my idea, which is to de-emphasize grades in favor of the MCAT. After all, if you’re going to use the MCAT as a reliability check because you know that grades are a distorted signal, then why even bother looking at grades at all? </p>
<p>Let me put it to you another way. Consider a guy who took extremely difficult courses at an extremely difficult school, i.e. EECS at MIT. His GPA is rather poor because of the sheer difficulty of his coursework. But he knows a lot and consequently does well on the MCAT. That guy is going to encounter problems in the admissions process because his GPA will be clearly lower than the other applicants who completed easier majors at easier schools (yet gotten the same MCAT score). Maybe he’ll get in anyway purely on the strength of his MCAT, but clearly his road is much more difficult. </p>
<p>But why should it be that way? Why should he have a harder road? After all, if the other applicants had taken his coursework, they probably would have ended up with mediocre grades too. But they didn’t, so they can present higher grades to the adcoms. </p>
<p>2 possibilities then exist. #1, like I said, the guy encounters more difficulty in getting into med-school because of his “subpar” GPA. But that speaks to the problem I stated before about the unfairness and distortion of grades. Or, #2, the adcoms, via his equivalent MCAT score, realize that this guy is just as qualified as the other applicants. But if that is the case, then why even bother using grades at all? Why not just rely on the MCAT? Either way, the system is suboptimal. </p>
<p>The point is, to rely on grades is equivalent to rewarding cowardice. People get punished for going to difficult schools. Or by taking the ‘difficult’ BCPM track rather than the ‘easier’ BCPM track. For example, at my school, there were several sections of basic calculus, one of them being taught by an extremely difficult prof, and the ‘savvy’ premeds avoided that prof like the plague. Heck, I remember some premeds who decided not to take calculus during a particular semester at all, instead waiting for the following semester, all in an effort to avoid the difficult prof. </p>
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<p>Which is why I don’t think that LOR’s should be relied upon strongly either. </p>
<p>Yet the greatest source of unfairness is clearly the different grading schemes used by different schools (and even different profs within the same schools). The MCAT may not be perfect, but at least it’s fair, and hence provides no incentives for searching for easy courses.</p>
<p>“said it before, and I’ll say it again. European students can start medical programs straight out of high school. Students in Japan do the same. I am not aware of any evidence whatsoever that European or Japanese doctors know less or provide worse care than do US doctors - if anything, their health care systems actually seem to perform better than does the US system (although, granted, that also has to do with institutional factors such as universal health care and lower rates of violent crime). Nevertheless, foreign doctors are living proof that you can provide perfectly good medical care without having received the ‘benefits’ of a standalone undergrad education.”</p>
<p>Sakky, very, very unfortunate but accurate comment…</p>
<p>throw it down, sakky, throw it down.</p>
<p>Why is the complaint about orgo and not physics?</p>
<p>My $0.02: The hand surgeon would know things relative to his field. However, His knowledge of the anatomy of the head would be inferior to that held by a first-year medical student. Because the first-year needed to know it for the test, and the surgeon doesn’t. The skull is not his business, other than how it can affect the hand.</p>
<p>As for the wanting to know the bare minimum jab, we complain when we learn information that is valuable only for the sake of the boards at the end of 2nd year. For instance, we learned in metabolism why IV fructose should never be used. However, wouldn’t that mean that the situation would never come up? If the stuff causes hypoglycemia universally, hospitals won’t carry it. But it will likely be on the boards, so we can know it and get the question right on a test. There’s too much inertia in the cycle.</p>
<p>Sakky: The idea of MDs teaching college courses is great, but there are only 100-some med schools attached to colleges. What about kids that go to other schools?
I would imagine that GPA and MCAT usually correlate for most admitted med students, so perhaps adcoms are better at seeing through the gamed GPA than you give them credit for. Schools want to see an MCAT and a transcript to see if there’s a discrepancy: High GPA, low MCAT -> you may have taken the easy route through college. Vice versa-> you might be smart but lazy. There is space in the personal statement and interview to explain any discrepancies. For example, my verbal MCAT was three points lower than my other two sections. Adcom asked why. “Broke my ankle the week before the test and was on percocet. I fell asleep during that section and didn’t make it through the last passage and a half.” Mystery solved.</p>
<p>Grade inflation and deflation has its own threads, so I won’t go there, other than to say that every person I’ve ever spoken to thinks that his school’s orgo class was the hardest. Usually people find a way to have good grades and a good MCAT. Or they have to explain why.</p>
<p>Son of Opie,</p>
<p>I work with surgeons every day. Any hand surgeon has better knowledge of head anatomy than a first year medical student.</p>
<p>Hospitals, sadly, do carry useless and sometimes dangerous items on formulary. If you rely on the pharmacist to keep you out of trouble, you will be disappointed.</p>
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Mine wasn’t. :)</p>
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<p>My brother went to Caltech, not me, and I’ll be the first to say that his OChem course was harder than mine. In fact, I suspect that, except at a small handful of schools, all students would concede that their OChem course is probably not as hard as the one at Caltech. </p>
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<p>Well, first off, if those 100-odd colleges begin offering premed courses taught by MD’s, that’s still better than nothing at all. Just because we can’t get perfection doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to get something. Something is better than nothing. </p>
<p>Secondly, I don’t see why the MD’s necessarily have to come from a med-school that is attached to the college in question. For example, why can’t MIT premed courses be taught by MD’s from Harvard Medical School? After all, MIT already has an extensive cross-reg relationship with Harvard. Similarly, perhaps MIT can arrange for its premeds to take courses taught by MD’s from the Tufts SOM or BUSM. </p>
<p>Furthermore, I don’t even see why you necessarily need a medical school to be involved at all. All you really need are MD’s who are willing and able to teach. For example, I suspect there are some retired or semi-retired doctors out there who might be willing to teach (or co-teach) a course or two because they think it’s fun. Heck, one of my neighbors is a retired doctor who enjoys talking to premeds and I suspect he would be willing to teach, or at least help to build, a premed course. </p>
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<p>Or you might be smart and hard-working, but just took difficult courses. </p>
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<p>The problem with using the interview to explain discrepancies is simple: you first have to be invited to the interview. What if you’re not even invited because your GPA was ostensibly too low? </p>
<p>The real problem is clear if you think about the borderline candidates and the first-round screens. Somebody with both a borderline GPA and a borderline MCAT may get past the first-round screen and be invited to interview, whereupon that person may indeed try to explain how difficult his coursework was. But somebody with the same borderline MCAT, but a subpar GPA (perhaps because he took difficult courses), won’t even get an interview. Hence, he’s lost the game before it ever really got started. *That’s the problem. *</p>
<p>from what my professor has said about ochem, he says that it is one class that requires both memorization and logic reasoning. I’m assuming being able to do well in the course shows that you are good at both, and the qualities of being able to memorize and deduce is vital in med school?</p>
<p>They look at the transcript as well as the GPA. I think the dichotomy between GPA/courseload isn’t as big as people would believe. I would lend it credence if no one in a particular class got an A, but more often, the person is complaining because the person that got the A wasn’t them.</p>
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<p>Sure, but that actually presumes that premed adcoms actually know which courses are harder than others, and which profs are harder than others. How many adcoms actually know this? </p>
<p>Let me give you an example regarding Berkeley. Berkeley has 2 OChem tracks: the lower-division Chem 3AB series and the upper-division Chem 112AB series. Each series basically teach the same thing, but the latter series is usually taken by chemistry and chemical engineering majors whereas the former is taken by biology majors. However, not only is either track acceptable for the purposes of premed requirements, but the 2 tracks can also be mixed-and-matched (i.e. you can do Chem112A and then 3B to fulfill your premed requirements). </p>
<p>What is not so well known, but has been figured out by savvy premeds, is that the ‘weeder’ course in each track is unsynchonized: in the 3 series, it is 3A that is the weeder, and in the 112 series, it is 112B that is the weeder. Hence, savvy premeds have figured out that the optimal path for them to take to maximize their grades is to take 112A and then 3B. But the med-school adcoms obviously don’t know this trick. Heck, a lot of people at Berkeley don’t even know about this trick. If you just look at somebody’s transcript, and you see 112A followed by 3B, what happened is not obvious. That’s just one example of how you game the system. Then there is an ‘advanced iteration’ of the game in which one particular 112 prof is known to grade easier than the others, etc. </p>
<p>The major advantage of relying on the MCAT is that it eliminates all these games. No longer would students feel the need to shop around for easy courses and easy profs where they can get high grades for the least possible work. On the MCAT, you either know the material or you don’t, and hence students will be looking for those courses in which they will actually learn, which was supposed to be the whole point. </p>
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<p>Or, more importantly, that they could have gotten an A if they had just taken the same course, but at a different school. Or even at the same school, but under a different prof. Like I said, some schools and some profs grade easier than others. It is not only highly demoralizing, but also unfair, to be working harder and knowing more than somebody else, but actually getting a lower grade, just because you happened to have the harder prof. </p>
<p>Again, the advantage of the MCAT is that it is fair. Everybody has to take the same test. You don’t have to worry about different students being graded under different standards just because they had different profs. The process is fair.</p>
<p>Sakky, Come on! You surely agree that there will be many other very, very tough courses and very tough Profs even after you matriculate at a Med school. So, you can surely complete two Orgo courses, can’t you? </p>
<p>In anything you accomplish, attitude is 50% of the battle! And so what if you get one or two B’s? You can still ace other subjects to balance it.</p>