Personally i think MCAT score are maybe a little more important. MCAT can test your "potentials" to see if you have the intellectual potentials to think critically. Whereas, GPA is greatly affected by which school you go to. Think of it this way. You have a 3.6 or 3.7 at a state school but a 26-28 on MCAT. You could've have worked super hard to get that 3.6 others who worked alot less got 3.4 or 3.3 for their GPA but a 38 MCAT scores. This shows that even if you worked hard, your intellectual capability has been reached whereas the other person with a 38 and a worse GPA would've probably did ALOT better than you academically if they just put in alittle more effort into their work and they probably have a MUCH higher intellecutal capacity than you.
I dont know... that's just the way i think...
Having looked at these threads for a while, I'm going to bring up something that has been nagging at me - High GPA, Low MCAT students.
There are a lot of people out there with a consistent GPA around 3.8+ from a little-known school, who achieve an MCAT of < 32. Meanwhile, quite a few of the Ivys have students who work hard to get a GPA or 3.6+ and get high 30s/low 40s MCATs. I know it's par for the course around here to have a go at Ivys for grade inflation, but some of them are competitive and attract some students who really are on top of their game, while the question of grade inflation at lesser-known schools isn't discussed.
If the adcom doesn't know anything about your school's level of difficulty, there are two reasonable options for when a person has a high GPA and low MCAT:
1. The person had a bad MCAT day. Perhaps they need to retake. If they did the same over several MCATs, though, something is up.
2. Their school was easy in grading, and when they hit the MCAT, they got soundly beaten for it.
Meanwhile, a low GPA and high MCAT could indicate:
1. Good test taker, bad long-term student (unlikely, because the MCAT covers stuff that will be in the majority of basic science exams)
2. That the student had some sort of undergrad problems that harmed their GPA (health, family, etc.)
3. That their school was tough in grading.
Ideally, a student should have a 32+ MCAT with a 3.6+ GPA. The two complement each other and tell the adcoms that neither of the grades is an error, and that you are a solid student and they can trust those metrics.
Looking at the Harvard graduates from MDApps (Harvard College and HES), there are a few oddities, but by and large, MCAT = GPA x 10. That's a neat correlation. I imagine that people with those stats or people with MCAT > GPA x 10 look better on the face of it than high GPA, low MCAT.
That said, the consensus here seems to be that top schools tend to screen for GPAs above 3.6/3.65, so for good interest at top 25 MD schools, 3.6+/36+ is probably nice. Most of those schools start their secondaries late and don't have rolling admissions, so timing is probably less of an issue than for some others.
YMMV.
