Does it look bad if ...

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alex21216

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Does it look bad if you retake pre-med courses you took in college, if say it's been 1 year since you graduated, if you do really well in them the 2nd time around. Anyone know any successful applicants with similiar situations?

Thank you
 
I am curious about this as well...I will have to re-take them when I graduate too.

J
 
i have a friend who is a few years out of UG and he's taken all of his pre-reqs again. he now has interviews at Harvard, Northwestern and UW (among 12 others). he does have a different story though...
 
I retook a couple of classes and improved my GPA on my transcripts. Medical schools didn't say anything about it but when AMCAS calculated my GPA, the calculation included my first grade (lower) as well. Kind of sucks, but I guess that's the name of the game. If you think you can really improve like a C to an A then do it. B to a A might not be worth your time or money. Good luck! 👍
 
Just be careful. You don't want to re-take anything unless you will do MUCH better the second time. (As in, you got a C or lower and will now get an A)
 
I'm an example of successful re-taking. I graduated in '99 with a BCPM of 2.62, or 2.65, or something. My pre-requisite grades were nice and low; I never got an A of any sort, and I think there were more Cs than Bs. I re-took all four of the intro science courses, starting in June of 2004. My post-bac GPA was 3.93, with only two A-s "marring" my record this time.

I sent my AMCAS to 15 schools this year. As of today, I've gotten five interviews and five acceptances. No one ever asked me why I re-took those classes; in fact, no one ever mentioned it to me at all. Of course, there's no telling whether some of those other ten schools did just that and decided not to invite me for an interview.

So it can be done, but I would recommend you work your butt off and do everything you can to earn As while you're taking them. Otherwise you're just going to waste your time and money.
 
UVMTrifecta said:
would you mind sharing that story with us?? 🙂
Click to expand...

i don't know if you were asking me to share my story or not but here goes:

my friend is a non-trad who went to the academy for school. he's a helicopter pilot in the navy and from reading his PS, has flown places all over the world. he wasn't happy with his UG GPA (somewhere between a 3.0 and 3.5) so he took classes (pre-reqs he's already taken) and is now sitting pretty with a number of interviews at top 10 schools. don't know if that helps at all but there it is... good luck!
 
I took most of the classes which would be called "prereqs" 19+ years ago, but I was not premed at the time. Did okay (mostly B's, but A's in Chem & Physics). But I'm back in school (the same school it turns out), retaking them because 1) I want to get A's this time, 2) I still need to do O'Chem (I got a C- the first time in 1986), and 3) I want to show schools that I can do recent courses and do well in them. Whether this will help me, I don't know, but I'll keep trying anyway.
 
alex21216 said:
Does it look bad if you retake pre-med courses you took in college, if say it's been 1 year since you graduated, if you do really well in them the 2nd time around. Anyone know any successful applicants with similiar situations?

Thank you
Click to expand...

This is totally my opinion, but I suspect it depends a lot on what transpired in that year, and what kind of cumulative GPA you came out of college with. If you weren't a full blown premed, graduated and did something else interesting for a year (or ideally a few more than a year) and then decided what you really wanted to do was medicine, and so you went ahead and retook and aced the prereqs, and did well on the MCAT that might be a good story to sell to adcoms. However if you muddled through or goofed off in college with a mediocre GPA, wasted another year doing nothing of interest, and now are just going to go ahead and retry those courses, it will be a much harder sell, although clearly from some of the prior posts not impossible. (But it's certainly a harder road, which is why some of the more formal postbac programs wont marr their placement percentages by accepting folks who have already taken the prereqs.) Thus I'd suggest spending the time between college and med school doing something unique or unusual (a full time brain taxing job, or something like the peace corps) before going back to the classes, and when you do go back, make sure you pace it and get whatever tutoring etc you need such that you end up with all A's the second time around. Good luck.
 
I have heard that retaking courses is not a bad thing, but I've heard conflicting stories as to whether or not the admitting schools take into consideration the grades you had before you retook the classes, but I have heard numerous times that they will also consider how much you have improved since those classes. For example, you might have gotten a C in Intro to Chem, but you got a B or an A in Organic Chem. Which they would, of course, like to see progress.
 
Since it seems the consensus is that med schools look at your BCPM GPA more than any individual class, it might be a better idea to take some upper division Bio or Chem - a lot of people on this board have talked about how courses like anatomy, histology, biochem, microbio, etc have helped them on the MCAT and in med school.

If you feel like you can rock the MCAT without retaking the classes, taking advanced courses may be a better option. You'll show that you've mastered the basic science stuff with the MCAT scores, and also show your dedication to med school with relevant coursework. In some cases it's even easier to get A's in advanced sciences, since the classes are smaller and somewhat self-selecting.
 
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