I have known literally dozens of community college students who want to be MDs. They take all the requisite chemistry, biology, and calculus classes you would expect, and a fair percentage of them are top-notch students (although really, most aren’t). But would any American medical school accept them? When I was growing up in the 70s, admission to med school was so competitive that they had more people applying with 4.0 GPAs than there were admission slots, so they frequently resolved it by factoring in high school GPAs. My cousin graduated from UCLA in the mid-70s with a near-perfect GPA and was rejected by 12 separate schools. What is the situation now? Is it still as difficult to get into med school as it was back then, or do these CC kids I know actually have a realistic shot at admission?
What does this mean? Do you mean that they are top-notch relative to the average CC student but they are mediocre compared to students at four year schools? Is Chemistry 1 at a CC significantly easier in terms of material covered or strictness in grading than Chemistry 1 at Virginia Tech or UCLA? Is an “A” at a community college equivalent to a “B” or “C” at a four year school? I would imagine the answer is no because four year schools will generally accept such transfers from CC’s.
Probably fairly close. CCs in California don’t just babysit people anymore, like they did in the 80s. The classes are comparable to the corresponding class at the state university, but probably not quite as intense as the freshman or sophomore course at the UC system.
Did they not have the MCAT back then?
My college girlfriend transferred in (to an Ivy League school) from a CC (CCCC, in fact) with a 4.0 QPA, and graduated with a 4.0 QPA, and got into Harvard Med, which impressed the hell out of me. This was way back when in the 1970s, so all I can attest to is that it was once possible.
I looked it up. It’s been in existence since 1928, in various forms.
I think it means that most aren’t top notch students. It’s the same everywhere. It turns out that fewer than one in ten students is in the top 5% of their class. You could look it up.
I don’t need to look it up. In any class, one out of ten students in a class will be in the top 10%. One out of 20 will be in the top 5%.
I also discovered recently that half of all people have a below average understanding of mathematics.
The “ideal student” for a program changes over time. In the 80s, many medical schools were looking for “well rounded” applicants. I knew a girl who did premed at Harvard, graduated 4.0, and struggled to find a medical school that would take her. One of her med school classmates had a hell of a first year, then dropped out. He had a theology degree with the bare minimum science courses.
For a white or asian applicant to medical school, they’d have to have really really top notch MCAT scores because the dilemma with CC is not mastery of content; it’s that straight A’s in CC where the depth of competition is minimal means your overall GPA is more difficult to place in perspective.
If you’re in a minority group, it would be a much easier road, but you better still have decent MCATs to prove you can grasp content, because your grades are going to face the same scrutiny. A lot of med school is learning fact after fact, so if you want to get a kid through the first couple years, you want him to be able to master a bunch of facts. (No; that’s not the only important thing…necessary, but not sufficient.)
But someone who gives a good story about why they pursued a non-standard path would still have a chance as long as their GPA for appropriately rigorous courses was competitive once they got to a regular 4 yr school, and their MCATs were competitive with the SIRE group within which they are being considered.
I think the field of medicine has lost some panache and therefore it’s not as absolutely competitive as it was in the golden 70s, but it’s sort of hard to quantitate that across the decades.
Except, of course, in Lake Wobegon.
In Quebec, every graduate of HS here must go to a 2 year CC before getting into university for a three year program (HS ends at grade 11, so it all adds up to the same 16 years). But, and this is what is different. A certain percentage of med school admissions are required to be from CC graduates who have not been to university at all. But they are put into a five year program in which the first year is used to catch up on all the chemistry and biology they missed out on. One of them took a course I gave in history of math. He explained to me that he always liked math, but was now in med school. But this catch-up year allowed one elective and he had chosen this as his last chance to take a math course.
I do have some real information on this. In my community college organic chemistry class there were two students who became M.D.'s, and one who became a chiropractor. None of them seemed to have any trouble getting into medical school, but the two M.D.'s were both children of physicians, which seems to be the best way to get accepted to med school, possibly they might have had trouble otherwise.
Kind of an unusual grade curve on the ACS final, bimodal. A large peak around the 90th percentile, and another one around the 40th. We had two students score worse than random guessing. The highest score on the final was from the future chiropractor. He was the smartest guy in the class. I always kidded him about going into a field where your patients never died, and they never got better either. It’s a gold mine.
I’d like to see a cite for this - never heard of it happening.
I am dubious about this as well. If one’s parents were very distinguished in their field and/or had donated a pile of money to the med school and their kid(s) met the basic qualifications, then they could well get a boost. Random doctor’s kid? Nothing special.
Minority students or those coming from a tough economic background who did early work in a community college and then transferred to a four-year school and did well could probably sell their qualifications to a medical school. Others might have a harder time of it.
I was trying to find a cite, but “legacy” has meanings other than accepting the offspring of alumni. I know people who got into the med school their parent/relative graduated from more easily than someone without legacy standing.
I’m pretty sure it was a joke.
Might have been BS, dunno. Just parroting what all our high school counselors used to say to us back then. Note that I did specify American med schools, though. Back then it sort of a cliché sitcom joke that if you couldn’t cut the mustard, you wound up spending four years in the Caribbean.