Online Prerequisites

[I love dogs27]

Due to my busy schedule I am needing to take my second English course and pre calc class online over the summer. Since these can be prerequisite courses will this look bad for medical school admissions?

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[Dee2daK]

Short answer: Your best bet is to take your prerequisite courses in person.

Long answer: This entirely depends on the medical school and (potentially) how many other courses you have had online. Some don't want any online courses unless they were mandatory during the pandemic. English? Many don't use this as a prerequisite course.. Math? Maybe, maybe not. Pre-calc is probably fine. Calculus, at least, I will strongly suggest in-person. Lab-based science, courses... definitely in-person.

A few points: Many transcripts don't explicitly list which classes are online - mine don't identify them differently so you would never know since I attended a mixture of in-person and online courses. A few schools (Harvard, as an example) will ask you to list every single online class you took (regardless of prerequisite status), however, so there's an honor system there (don't lie...).

Using the MSAR will tell you which schools will accept what types of courses online. If you feel like you need to do them this way now, you can use this tool later to determine where your classes aren't likely to be accepted.

 

[pablo213]

I think @Dee2daK did a great job answering your question. Anecdotally, I took 2-3 online science prerequisites with in person labs for similar reasons (just didn't have enough time in the week to work and go to school) and it was a huge headache trying to find schools to apply to that would take online credits and be within my stat range. A lot of schools were somewhat lenient with COVID but some were pretty strict and limited it to 2020-2021 academic year. Many put down "case-by-case" basis which was a bit frustrating so I emailed them to double check. Yale for example allows online lectures and in person labs for science prereqs whereas Harvard does not allow online science prereqs period and would require you to retake the class. For the schools of this type that I ended applying to (maybe around 8 or so), I chose to list the same courses I took online as future enrollment in person to see if that would work. The idea being that if I got an early II from them, I would go ahead and take the course again and if not then I would not bother. I have only heard back from one of those eight and since the cycle is well underway Im expecting pre-II Rs from the rest (granted that could be due to a host of different factors including my stats not being as competitive for them (it seems like top schools skew towards not accepting online courses unfortunately)).

 

[pablo213]

So overall would recommend taking English in person if at all possible. I don't think many schools care about precalculus from what i remember, as long as you have something like algebra and/or statistics. Some like case western (I think?) and albert Einstein like to see calculus.

 

[Angler]

https://students-residents.aamc.org/media/7041/download

This might help a little.

 

[I love dogs27]

Ok so I found out that my transcripts don’t explicitly state they are online courses. So unless a school asked me to distinguish them I would be fine? Or would they somehow find out? I’m mostly interested in my state schools(MI)

 

[pablo213]

Ok so I found out that my transcripts don’t explicitly state they are online courses. So unless a school asked me to distinguish them I would be fine? Or would they somehow find out? I’m mostly interested in my state schools(MI)

Apparently there's some database your transcript is fed through that may identify which courses are online. @Goro

 

[Goro]

Apparently there's some database your transcript is fed through that may identify which courses are online. @Goro

Outside my knowledge base. The AACOMAS app that I see doesn't show if a course is online or not.

 

[Nontrad_FL_LGBT]

Outside my knowledge base. The AACOMAS app that I see doesn't show if a course is online or not.

ExploreDO you can filter by if they accept online coursework or not; they all do based off the search.

 

[Dee2daK]

Apparently there's some database your transcript is fed through that may identify which courses are online. @Goro

Out of curiosity, do you have a source that told you this? I‘m skeptical since it seems like this sort of database would be onerous for acamedic institutions without any meaningful benefit…for anyone, really. I could be wrong though.

 

[pablo213]

Out of curiosity, do you have a source that told you this? I‘m skeptical since it seems like this sort of database would be onerous for acamedic institutions without any meaningful benefit…for anyone, really. I could be wrong though.

I think I relied mostly on what people were saying on reddit for this, but essentially there's an online "service" called the National Student Clearinghouse which medical schools or AMCAS (or both? idk) use to verify your transcript. I swear I was able to find more than a few recent threads that mentioned it here as well (SDN) in like May when I was first applying, but for whatever reason I'm struggling now lol (I think gonnif deleted like 90% of his comments which may be the culprit). Here is a link to a thread with a deleted comment by gonnif: Online Classes and Med School.

My school doesn't have an online indication for online classes so I wasn't thinking about reporting them as online unless explicitly requested, but I did find that the online courses had unique section numbers that one could easily look up so ended up doing it anyways. Your mileage may vary.

 

[Dee2daK]

I think I relied mostly on what people were saying on reddit for this, but essentially there's an online "service" called the National Student Clearinghouse which medical schools or AMCAS (or both? idk) use to verify your transcript. I swear I was able to find more than a few recent threads that mentioned it here as well (SDN) in like May when I was first applying, but for whatever reason I'm struggling now lol (I think gonnif deleted like 90% of his comments which may be the culprit). Here is a link to a thread with a deleted comment by gonnif: Online Classes and Med School.

My school doesn't have an online indication for online classes so I wasn't thinking about reporting them as online unless explicitly requested, but I did find that the online courses had unique section numbers that one could easily look up so ended up doing it anyways. Your mileage may vary.
View attachment 379837

I’m aware of the NSCH, naturally. I didn’t realize that there were ever efforts to cross-reference courses and catalogues to determine online vs resident courses. I suspect this is still of limited use, though. Out of the… 6 colleges I have transcripts from, they only notate the course number and title, but not the section. In cases where the institution offers sections in both resident and online formats, it still would appear that the NSCH has no way of determining this in a practical way.

Granted, this threat is 7 years old, so who knows what may have changed since then on NSCH’s end. Now my curiosity makes me want to see what I can found out.

Thanks!

 

[Mr.Smile12]

The National Student Clearinghouse is most useful once you send your final transcript to confirm your degree conferred and evidence of enrollment at all post secondary institutions; we report your matriculation to the Clearinghouse so we have to confirm your past records which they keep. I haven't heard anyone using it for the purpose you described to doxx online courses. I also have not found a document governing university registrars (AACRAO) about identifying courses as online as has been described above.