Ideal gpa

[luke587]

Whats an honestly good GPA by normal standards?

I'm in a student club where you get paired with a medical student mentor and he told me that >3.5 is ideal and shows you can handle course work pretty well. Another family friend told me who has served on admissions committees told me he really looks for upward trends from freshman to senior year and typically likes to see around a 3.6, 3.5 at the least. I went through the MSAR and some schools have 10th percentiles at a 3.2 GPA and 90th all the way to a 3.99, so wheres the common ground? 3.5/3.6 would put you right in the middle right?

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[EBTrailRunner]

I'd say you want a 3.5+ to be considered competitive for US MD programs.

 

[coyotelime]

Your friend is on the dot. 3.5+ would be competitive, and adcoms typically are forgiving of your freshman year provided you have a strong upward trend.

To have a 3.5 it means you have made at least 1/2 A or A- grades(depending on your system), and depending on your school and major even a 3.5 could be very impressive.

 

[phltz]

Whats an honestly good GPA by normal standards?

I'm in a student club where you get paired with a medical student mentor and he told me that >3.5 is ideal and shows you can handle course work pretty well. Another family friend told me who has served on admissions committees told me he really looks for upward trends from freshman to senior year and typically likes to see around a 3.6, 3.5 at the least. I went through the MSAR and some schools have 10th percentiles at a 3.2 GPA and 90th all the way to a 3.99, so wheres the common ground? 3.5/3.6 would put you right in the middle right?

What are you looking for here? The "ideal"? 4.0 is clearly ideal. "Honestly good by normal standards"? That depends on whose standards we're talking about. If you move in circles that are all gunning for Hopkins, they'll have different standards than if you just wanna go to Southern Pennsyltucky College of Osteopathic Medicine.

Do the best that you can in your academic studies. There's not much more to say than that.

 

[Praefectus]

What are you looking for here? The "ideal"? 4.0 is clearly ideal. "Honestly good by normal standards"? That depends on whose standards we're talking about. If you move in circles that are all gunning for Hopkins, they'll have different standards than if you just wanna go to Southern Pennsyltucky College of Osteopathic Medicine.

Do the best that you can in your academic studies. There's not much more to say than that.

Whoa there, Southern Pennsyltucky is a VERY prestigious school! I don't need you badmouthing it.

And yeah, shoot for at least a 3.5 but get it higher if you can. A higher MCAT will take some off some of the burden on a lower GPA, though.

 

[MedBound1]

national avg for accepted applicants is like 3.65 i think.

Being above 3.6 will relieve GPA from being any sort of 'ding' on your application, being above 3.8 makes your GPA an impressive feature of your app. Below 3.5 starts to raise questions..

 

[luke587]

Well thats good to know as I'm right around a 3.55ish after my sophomore year. I'm doing 8 hours this summer and hopefully that bumps it up to a 3.6 and I'll try to maintain it. I'm okay with DO as well, so I'll assume a 3.4-3.5 is above average for DO correct?

 

[MedBound1]

https://www.aamc.org/download/161690/data/table17.pdf

There's MD. I'm sure DO has a similar document somewhere.

average applicant MCAT: 28.2
average applicant GPA: 3.53

average matriculant MCAT: 31.1
average matriculant GPA: 3.67

Overall acceptance rate of all applicants (accepted to 1 or more schools): 43.8%

 

[Plue00]

Is this dependent on cGPA or sGPA? I feel like my sGPA will be a lot higher, maybe by like .25/.3 this year.

 

[MedBound1]

Is this dependent on cGPA or sGPA? I feel like my sGPA will be a lot higher, maybe by like .25/.3 this year.

If you're referring to my post, the stats I listed were cumulative GPA's. Here's science but its all included in that link..:

average applicant sGPA: 3.43
average matriculant sGPA: 3.61

If you're referring to how adcoms view your overall grades. More weight is given to your sGPA but they will ask questions if you completely bombed some of your non-science courses.

 

[yellowfish]

If we're talking "ideal GPA," aim for 3.8+. There will be no questions about your GPA anywhere. Lower, it can become part of a perceived "weakness" of your application at *some* institutions.

 

[911 Turbo]

I wish there was a way for schools to compensate for your major. A 4.0 in fashion design =/= a 4.0 in engineering.

And even then, isn't there a huge variance within classes and teachers? Two different calculus teachers might mean two different grades, depending on who you get.

I wish it were possible for medical schools to use a central database that took into account the individual difficulty of every professor in America - don't universities have numbers on every professor and the grades of the students? They could then use some sort of equation that equalized the grades the students got, comparatively. That way, adcoms wouldn't even have to look at the name of the institution.

 

[yellowfish]

I wish there was a way for schools to compensate for your major. A 4.0 in fashion design =/= a 4.0 in engineering.

And even then, isn't there a huge variance within classes and teachers? Two different calculus teachers might mean two different grades, depending on who you get.

I wish it were possible for medical schools to use a central database that took into account the individual difficulty of every professor in America - don't universities have numbers on every professor and the grades of the students? They could then use some sort of equation that equalized the grades the students got, comparatively. That way, adcoms wouldn't even have to look at the name of the institution.

Some schools are starting to list the mean/median grade of classes that you took on your transcript as a measure of your "course difficulty." At the same time, this wouldn't eliminate undergraduate institution from the equation - comparing students across institutions would still be difficult since the student body at one institution may be more competitive than that of another. I don't think it would be possible to account for this discrepancy with an equation, since there is no general agreement on exactly how much harder it is to get an A at institution A versus institution B.

 

[Iso4ane]

I'm not an adcom or anything, but I feel that in most cases a 3.75-3.8 is more than reasonable. That (on a purely A B C ... scale) is , one average, one B per semester for 4-5 equal credit courses.

 

[PTG]

If you pulled a 3.5 in grad school with a low 30s MCAT would that be enough to help MD schools overlook a 2.9/3.0 undergrad GPA? Assuming extra curriculars/volunteer work/shadowing are all there with excellent LOR and statements.

 

[MedPR]

4.0 is obviously the ideal GPA. 3.5+ is probably good enough.