Are you a prospective or future applicant who lives in the Prince George area? If so, please check out the poster on the left for details about an upcoming info session at UNBC (click to enlarge). The Associate Dean of Admissions and MD Admissions staff will be available to answer questions and provide information about the program. We hope to see you there!
In addition to Prince George, information sessions are held in Kelowna, Victoria, and Vancouver. Please visit our Information Sessions page for upcoming Vancouver dates and links to dates in other cities.
Dear UBC admissions,
How are you dealing with things like grade inflation of your applicant pool? Is this a major concern?
It seems like most Canadian medical schools are generally accepting raw GPA scores without any consideration to degree difficulty, inflation, institutional difficulty, etc.
Grade inflation is certainly something we have heard about, and we regularly see averages of above 90% now whereas such high averages were unusual even a few years ago. However, we don’t know if this is due to grade inflation, or to truly better performance in courses, or perhaps some combination of both. Admission to medical school has become more competitive and this may be putting upward pressure on grades as well. In essence, grade inflation is on our radar, but as of now we calculate GPAs based only on the grades that appear on the transcript.
Regarding the other items you listed, we welcome applicants from a variety of educational and institutional backgrounds and do not have a preference for one institution/degree/major over another.
Thank you for your reply. I have the following questions.
1. Could you please clarify what “grade inflation is on our radar” actually mean? Are you actually going to take some sort of action, or essentially keep track of trends? If you are going to take action, what is the time frame?
2. If grades are steadily improving over the past several years, do you notice an increasing trend in test scores or standardized testing among your medical students over time? That would give you a better indicator of grade inflation. Perhaps your entering class has a high GPA when entering medical school, but their test scores are similar when compared to previous years
3. It’s laudable that you are welcome to all applicants from a variety of educational and institutional backgrounds; how are you standardizing things like GPA between institutions. It seems that some students will be at a disadvantage if they choose to go to harder/rigorous institutions and programs. I’d recommend looking at things like percentile rankings or class averages to see where a student actually stands.
1. We’re in the monitoring stage for now. As we said in our previous comment, even if grades are generally improving each year, it’s hard to say how much of the increase is due to grade inflation.
2. We do track MCAT scores, and our Statistics page shows that MCAT scores tend to increase slightly over time.
3. Several other people have provided the same suggestion regarding class averages. However, not all institutions provide class averages on their transcripts. As far as institutions go: one, operationalizing institutional rigor in an evidence-based way is difficult, and two, we really do want applicants to apply from a variety of institutions. Strong applicants can come from anywhere and from a variety of degree programs. Plus, at UBC, we believe that your academic background provides insight into only one aspect of your suitability for medical school. This is why grades and non-academics are both worth 50% in the pre-interview formula, and why applications are reviewed holistically post-interview.