I apologize but I am going to resurrect this thread to answer it more objectively as I believe the original poster asked the question with the wrong intentions and this particular scenario is still relevant to the current application cycle for anybody who has CC coursework as it was over a decade ago.
For those who are unaware, PTK is the honor society for CC's. You have to have a 3.5 minimum and sometimes a 3.6 to be offered an invitation to join. It's an academic accomplishment regardless of how you view the "rigor" of two and four-year institutions. The membership is noted on your transcript and stamped on your diploma so there is a degree of finality to this accomplishment.
You don't accept membership to PTK or PBK for that matter to necessarily impress ANYBODY. You accept those memberships to acknowledge and recognize your own academic success. The OP of this thead apparently earned the membership but was asking if they should accept it based on how it would look to adcoms and I suspect they were asking it in a way to really take a dig at two-year schools. That is just a stupid approach to an issue like this. Adcoms turn down students with higher GPA's than 3.6 so why would they care about ANY honor society society with a GPA cutoff that is 3.5 for most programs? That's just common sense. The issue is not whether PTK is worth it for medical school admissions, the issue really is what are the pros and cons of PTK or any of these honor societies at the college level and their significance to your overall accomplishments.
I have a bachelors and an A.S but I did them in reverse order. I accepted PTK membership for the one year I spent at the CC and you know what? I got a partial scholarship through PTK for medical school. Was it worth it to join PTK? Well that depends, did it impress an adcom member at my school? I don't know and I never looked at it that way. Did it help me out in the end? Yes, because it's another academic award and I gained a scholarship out of it. I don't compare my membership to PTK against "someone else's accomplishments" because in the end I'm right where I want to be. Now if medical schools start saying "we frown upon PTK members" then I would say it is absolutely not worth it to join.
Please don't look at these honor societies etc. as they relate to medical school admissions or as they related to someone else's story. I've said this in another post but I'll reiterate it here as it is still pertinent today. Having gone through the admissions process recently myself, medical school admissions is partly a lottery process. If you were to look at the absolute perfect candidates to study medicine, you would have several batches of applicant pools that meet that criteria and then only one batch of an accepted pool due to the spots available. If the rejected pool kept adding or subtracting things from their application in the hopes of finally gaining admission, they would actually be losing more than they would be gaining in the end due to the unpredictability of admissions and the large applicant pool. Don't be that person. You can only do your best and be yourself and that's the best guarantee that you will get into medical school.
In the end, will PTK membership impress anybody? Who knows and who cares and that's not why you accept the honors. Will it benefit you the recipient? I mean I don't know how an honor society would hurt you unless the membership fee could have bought you the winning Powerball numbers on the day you sent in the payment for the membership fee. But what are those odds?
