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biostats1092 said:
What are typical grading systems now? I'm curious, because this is how my school does it and I never knew it to be too different from that of other med schools.... I suspect a lot of med schools are H/P/F the whole 4 years?
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Most schools are p/f preclinical and h/p/f clinical with internal rankings.
 
Bottom line, it’s impossible for us to say what a “good” GPA is out of context. A more meaningful assessment is probably your class rank/quartile, as that incorporates what percentage of students get what grades.

Since this is an internal PhD application they will probably know how your GPA stacks up against other students at your school. It is also impossible for us to speculate how importantly that would be weighed against other factors, such as your research acumen. Since these internal physician scientist program transfers are pretty uncommon it’s hard for us to guess what they really care about in deciding such applications
 
biostats1092 said:
I'm predicting I'll finish off my preclinical years with a 3.3-3.5 range GPA (current M2) by spring. Then, we have the P/F curriculum for the last two years.

My school has a grading scale of letter grades up to 4.0 for the first 2 years, then it's H/P/F for the last two.

What is considered to be a good GPA in medical school? I tried hard, but I couldn't get straight A's in preclinicals. On an aside, I'm also trying for an internal transfer into the MD/DOPhD program at my medical school, so I am not sure what they make of my low preclinical GPA. In UG, I had >3.9, close to 4.0.
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I've always felt that if my own DO students were at a 3.0+ in preclinicals, then it's OK for then to take Step I. <3.0? take COMLEX only. So far, I'd say that you're doing fine!
 
Why do you want to do the PhD? The PhD programs affiliated with DO programs are pretty generic so not sure what you gain from the 4-5 extra years unless you legit want to be a professor who does mainly research. My DO school had a PhD program students could apply into and as long as you were a decent med student and had a faculty member that you were wanting to work with it was pretty much an automatic acceptance. It wasn't the same process as people applying from outside to the PhD program.

No one cares about your preclinical GPA. This isn't undergrad, a 3.3 GPA isn't low. That's about what mine was and residency programs didn't give a rats fart, it was all about my board scores, research output and LOR's.
 
It’s not really what you were asking, but I agree with @DOVinciRobot that you should be thoughtful about the why for your PhD. Do not do a PhD unless you seriously want to pursue an academic career with significant research output, or some other specialized nonclinical position where your research expertise will help you. Occasionally I see students who want a PhD because they think that it’ll help them stand out for a competitive residency and I think that is a bad idea—you can get more than enough research from a single research year
 
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