I'm currently a post-bac student and I was hoping that someone could answer an admission question I have. I have had good grades as a post bac (3.7 BCPM GPA in the 35 or so units I have taken since completing my undergrad degree). Unfortunately I made some poor marks when I was an undergrad when I took a handful of science/math classes, and they are still weighing down my BCPM GPA. It looks like I will have an overall BCPM (undegrad + postbac) GPA of about 3.3-3.4 by the time I am done with postbac and ready to apply to medical school. My understanding is that most medical schools set a minimum level for GPA and MCAT and don't even look at applications that don't meet the minimum level. Does this mean that my application would just get tossed by any school whose cutoff I didn't meet? Or is there a way that they look at postbac applicants differently so that they have a chance to be competitive to high level medical schools if they did very well as a postbac after having somewhat mediocre science/math marks as an undergrad?
Postbac GPA and Med School Applications
- Thread starter clathen
- Start date
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2006
- Messages
- 7,506
- Reaction score
- 2,707
There's a thing called an SMP, which you can learn about in the posts at the top of the forum.
There's also a low GPA thread in this forum, where over a half million people so far have learned about how to stage a GPA comeback to med school.
Best of luck to you.
So I'm currently doing post-bac, is there some reason I should be in an SMP instead? Also presuming I manage to raise my cumulative BCPM GPA to 3.3-3.4, would I still be evaluated exactly the same as applicants coming straight out of college with the same GPA? Basically my question is: will my application even get looked like at when a medical school sets a minimum cutoff for cumulative GPA that is higher than my cumulative BCPM GPA? My BCPM as a post bac is 3.7-3.8 and I'm worried my application won't even get looked at by schools that require such a GPA because my overall BCPM GPA is not that impressive. Is this the case, or do they have a way to look at your postbac GPA separately than undergrad?
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2012
- Messages
- 164
- Reaction score
- 16
You will be evaluated more or less the same as applicants coming out of college with the same GPA, with some consideration given for upward trend. To get into med school, you either need to raise your GPA to the point where your upward trend, overall GPA and MCAT make you competitive) or you do an SMP, which would mean you'd be evaluated on your performance in the SMP and on the MCAT. Notice that a strong performance in an SMP can mitigate a mediocre performance in undergrad (but you probably still need an undergrad GPA above 3.0) but the only way to mitigate a bad MCAT is to take the MCAT again and get a good MCAT.