What’s wrong with William & Mary?
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Anonymous
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1. 56% of US college students are female.
2. The students chatting before the info session, giving tours, etc are volunteers. It’s so weird when people get mad that a certain kind of student wasn’t greeting or chatting. They have class. They’re volunteers at most schools. They fit that in with all the other stuff they’re doing. |
Anonymous
| Our DD likes the vibe and nerdiness of W&M and it would be a good fit for her, but she want to do pre-health and needs a great GPA. W&M is probably too much of a grind to maintain a 3.5+ she'd need for med school. |
Anonymous
To quote someone from the VT thread, why do some people present their school in reference to UVA, which is so incredibly different? |
Anonymous
She’ll need at least a 3.8, actually. |
Anonymous
Because that’s how the article presented it. |
Anonymous
Did you miss the "+"? |
Anonymous
What article? Are you the person who topped this thread with that comment? There's no link to any article. |
Anonymous
Not really. Trend lines for both are generally down over time. That is the case for most schools because kids are applying to more and more schools and they can only choose one. UVA in-state yield has declined from 68% in 2004 to 58% in 2018. OOS has gone from 38% to 24% over the same period. W&M in-state yield rate has gone from 48% to 35% in the same period. OOS has gone from 30% to 22%. Historically, these schools have had very similar stats, but as you can see UVA has higher yield. My mathematical take on that would be that UVA is much larger, so if they are drawing from an overlapping pool, UVA will need to get a bit more than 7 out of 10 and W&M a bit less than 3 out of 10 to have similar stats. I do think UVA seems to be a bit hotter right now, but these things tend to change over time. They can even change quite quickly at individual schools where the kids influence each other in their selections. |
Anonymous
W&M actually has quite high average GPAs for a public school. You can see data at gradeinflation.com . W&M average was 3.33 in 2014. In comparison, UVA was 3.32 in 2013, and VT was 3.15 in 2015. Grades tend to go up over time so could be higher now. |
Anonymous
W&M is also more expensive so that has to have a big impact on yield when students are debating their options. And, students drawn to the W&M environment are probably comparing offers from SLACs that are providing significant merit aid. If W&M could lower their price to match the other VA public schools, they'd probably see some yield improvement but I guess it's not concerning them enough right now to do that. |
Anonymous
Yes, but it's really hard to get those high grades. Whereas in many schools regularly attending and doing all your work in most classes (non-STEM) might get you a low B, that is not the case at W&M. Students study a lot to get that 3.33 average (I think that's still the average). They really do give C's and D's to kids who complete all the work. And when you figure at both W&M and UVA nearly all the students there have weighted HS GPAS above 4.0 and SATs in the top 10% of their class, some of the really strong students work their best and still won't make the grade. There are fewer people who are slacking off to fill up the low end of the curve at W&M. So you can't just go by average GPA and assume it's inflation. Pre-med students are wise not to just investigate average GPA but what are the culture/practice/study habits of those who get below the average GPA at a school. |
Anonymous
Inflation is simply whether average grades are going up over time, and they are at most universities. gradeinflation.com shows that. What it also shows is that grades tend to be highest at the most selective schools, particularly selective privates. W&M and UVA at 3.33 and 3.32 respectively are pretty close to if not higher than comparable schools like UCLA (3.27), Berkeley (3.29), Michigan (3.37), North Carolina (3.23), and Georgia Tech (3.25). Highest tends to be schools like Brown at 3.63 (in 2012). You are going to have to work hard in pre-med no matter where you go. You should look for places where you feel comfortable, the atmosphere isn't cut-throat, and you feel comfortable with the recommendation policy. Some schools do that by committee. You can probably actually correspond with the pre-med advisors at some schools to see what they offer. Schools have different ways of describing their medical school admit rates, so take those with a grain of salt. |
Anonymous
| When I did an overnight there twenty years ago, both male and female students said that it was easier to get into William and Mary if you were a boy. I doubt this has changed. |
Anonymous
Adding to this though: I'm glad DC chose W&M in part because it is hard academically. (I have two others who went to similarly "good" schools and they all agree that W&M is tougher). I think we can lose sight that education is not mainly just getting a credential to access the next thing, but there is intrinsic value to what is learned and the work habits developed. I think having significant challenging work with realistic feedback for 4 formative years has important long-term benefits. Some majors do this just by the content in a wide range of schools (e.g., engineering is going to be more uniformly challenging across schools than say business or history, because the demands of engineering education are more precise and specified), but for majors that are more variable across institutions I think it's valuable to go to the toughest one your child will thrive at. |
Anonymous
3.8-plus, unless you’re aiming for some loser medical school. William and Mary weeds out med school wannabes very quickly. |