Question about Credit Hours on Secondaries

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.

airplanes

Full Member
15+ Year Member
Joined
Jun 30, 2008
Messages
7,490
Reaction score
388
Hi, I am filling out my secondary for GWU and they want me to fill in my credits and grades for some pre-reqs. It says they want 6 hours of Organic Chemistry and 2 hours of O-Chem Lab. I took a year under the quarter system (4 credits for three terms, with the last term being a lab) and my credits convert to be 5.4 for Organic Chemistry lecture and 2.7 for Organic Chemistry Lab. Will I not meet the requirements of GWU and therefore should not send the secondary in?

It seems like it should be ok since I took a year...but I just wanted to make sure. I will probably go around breakign things if it turns out I can't apply to any med schools because I don't "meet" their Ochem lecture requirements because of the semester system...🙂
 
Hi, I am filling out my secondary for GWU and they want me to fill in my credits and grades for some pre-reqs. It says they want 6 hours of Organic Chemistry and 2 hours of O-Chem Lab. I took a year under the quarter system (4 credits for three terms, with the last term being a lab) and my credits convert to be 5.4 for Organic Chemistry lecture and 2.7 for Organic Chemistry Lab. Will I not meet the requirements of GWU and therefore should not send the secondary in?

It seems like it should be ok since I took a year...but I just wanted to make sure. I will probably go around breakign things if it turns out I can't apply to any med schools because I don't "meet" their Ochem lecture requirements because of the semester system...🙂

Some (? most) schools require "one year" of the pre reqs, plus labs, but you may find that schools with an hours requirement will question you about it, but I think that it will not be a deal breaker if you took the full offering from your school, begging the question: is this also how your school does the other sciences?

It does seem, however, that your O-Chem falls short of a year's worth of credits when compared to the semester system. Under a quarter system, it seems like there should be 3 quarters of lecture, not just 2, to more or less equal 2 semesters. Was there an additional O-Chem class you could have / should have taken?
 
Were the credit hours assigned to your classes by AMCAS? I'm at a quarter-system school as well, and each of my classes was were assigned 3.30 semester credits. As a result, my 3-quarter OChem class (lab and lecture were combined into 1 course) ended up being 9.9 semester credits.
 
Were the credit hours assigned to your classes by AMCAS? I'm at a quarter-system school as well, and each of my classes was were assigned 3.30 semester credits. As a result, my 3-quarter OChem class (lab and lecture were combined into 1 course) ended up being 9.9 semester credits.

So what were the quarter hours? Looks like your lecture/lab combo must have been around 4.5 to 5 quarter hours per quarter?

At my semester based school, the lecture is 3 hours and the lab is 3 freaking hours. So 12 hours for 2 semesters of classes - way overkilled, but that is the way it is done here.

The OP's hours definitely seem to be on the low side for some reason. I think it is fishy that there were only 2 quarters of lecture...that sounds like it is one quarter short...
 
Were the credit hours assigned to your classes by AMCAS? I'm at a quarter-system school as well, and each of my classes was were assigned 3.30 semester credits. As a result, my 3-quarter OChem class (lab and lecture were combined into 1 course) ended up being 9.9 semester credits.

Seconded. Take the AMCAS designation.

If I hadn't done that, it would have looked like I only had 2 credit hours of organic chem + lab when in reality I took the whole sequence at my school.

Schools award credit for classes differently so AMCAS tries to equalize the whole thing.
 
Top