Does a dental school look at whether I took hard or easy courses?

[archonsbk]

---

Members do not see this ad.

My friend who got into a dental school a couple yrs ago told me to take easy classes only. He told me that dental schools wont care how hard your classes are. They just look at your overall GPA and science GPA and if they are low, you would get rejected... Is this true?

If so, I felt like it was a stupid idea to take a ridiculous chemistry class in my freshman yr. I did terrible.......but some of my friends took easy classes and have like 3.8 GPA.

Is this true? or does a dental school look at classes I took and understand each applicant's situation?

According to my friend, this would happen;
Student A - 3.8 GPA with easy classes
Student B - 3.3 GPA with honors...

Student A has a higher chance to get into a dental school, right??

 

[license2kill]

Student C would have a better chance of getting in b/c he took harder classes and maintained a 3.8

IMO, it is true that a student with a better GPA will have a better chance of getting accepted into D school, but there is really no way you can avoid difficult classes. All of your prerequisites will be challenging and generally it is good to take some upper division classes in biology. This will help come DAT time and during some interviews they will ask what additional classes you have taken in biology such as genetics, immunology, cell biology, etc...

And no, underwater basket weaving 101 does not count as a difficult class.^^

 

[NyCzPeter]

My friend who got into a dental school a couple yrs ago told me to take easy classes only. He told me that dental schools wont care how hard your classes are. They just look at your overall GPA and science GPA and if they are low, you would get rejected... Is this true?

If so, I felt like it was a stupid idea to take a ridiculous chemistry class in my freshman yr. I did terrible.......but some of my friends took easy classes and have like 3.8 GPA.

Is this true? or does a dental school look at classes I took and understand each applicant's situation?

According to my friend, this would happen;
Student A - 3.8 GPA with easy classes
Student B - 3.3 GPA with honors...

Student A has a higher chance to get into a dental school, right??

Totally. How would a dental school know what classes are "easy" and which ones aren't? Even if it has "honors" written all over it, the 3.3 is way too low.

 

[Svart Aske]

You have to take the usual prereqs like o-chem and biochemistry anyway. Not easy, I assure you. You don't need to be a science major to get into dental school, but be wary of filling up your transcript with classes on post-modern feminist literature and Italian neorealism. Take some "hard classes" (or ones that sound hard) just to show that you can.

 

[Vicviper]

Yeah, and the real equalizer is the DAT, it doesn't really matter if you took hard classes and did poorly or took easy classes and did well if you didn't learn the material well enough to do decently on the DAT. I think if a school sees a 3.8 sGPA and a 16AA, that will really send up a ton of red flags, whereas a 3.01 sGPA and a 22AA will let them know that the GPA isn't necessarily the only determiner. And 3.3 isn't really that low at all. ;p

 

[UCfan]

Totally. How would a dental school know what classes are "easy" and which ones aren't? Even if it has "honors" written all over it, the 3.3 is way too low.

Just take an engineering degree from schools which only give A only top 10 to 15 percent of class (compete with students who are very smart and hard working), then your ultimate (dream) goal will to reach 3.3.