Semester hours check

[SrootsWwings]

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I just want to make sure I have this right, as it seems silly:

If a school does not provide a conversion factor to AMCAS for semester, then AMCAS uses the number of credit hours provided by the school's OT. That makes sense until you have grades from two or more schools, with one school using 4 credits/class and another using 3/class. Due to this, hypothetically, one could have taken 4 classes each at two schools, making all A's at the first school (4 credits/class) and all B's at the second (3 credits/class), and his/her official GPA would NOT be a 3.50, but a 3.57.

Is this a correct assessment? If so, just another aspect of AMCAS of which to take a deep breath, accept, and move forward (given that my post-bacc school happens to be a 3 credit school and my alma mater a 4 credit school, not vice-versa).

Thanks!

 

[Captain Sisko]

I just want to make sure I have this right, as it seems silly:

If a school does not provide a conversion factor to AMCAS for semester, then AMCAS uses the number of credit hours provided by the school's OT. That makes sense until you have grades from two or more schools, with one school using 4 credits/class and another using 3/class. Due to this, hypothetically, one could have taken 4 classes each at two schools, making all A's at the first school (4 credits/class) and all B's at the second (3 credits/class), and his/her official GPA would NOT be a 3.50, but a 3.57.

Is this a correct assessment? If so, just another aspect of AMCAS of which to take a deep breath, accept, and move forward (given that my post-bacc school happens to be a 3 credit school and my alma mater a 4 credit school, not vice-versa).

Thanks!

For every single course that you enter, I believe where you specify when you took it, you will enter whether or not it was on a quarter, semester, trimesters, etc system.

 

[Chip N Sawbones]

For every single course that you enter, I believe where you specify when you took it, you will enter whether or not it was on a quarter, semester, trimesters, etc system.

Correct. You enter all your courses into AMCAS/AACOMAS and it will crank out a GPA for you. One credit on the quarter system counts as .67 semester credits.

 

[OCDOCDOCD]

For every single course that you enter, I believe where you specify when you took it, you will enter whether or not it was on a quarter, semester, trimesters, etc system.

I believe what OP is asking is how do you handle credit hours when you attended two universities that had different philosophies on how many credits their average classes were worth.

I have the same concern as OP. My first college usually gave 3 hours/class. My second college, however, gave 4 hours/class. They were both on the semester system, but the second one just thought so highly of itself that they handed out an extra credit hour per class to "represent how hard our classes are" (their words).

Normally the consequence of such a policy would only be that a person could hit full time taking only 3 classes instead of 4 (which is the intended effect), but when you transfer to a school with a different credit policy, you get a second consequence which is that the classes you took at your 4 hour/class university count more towards your GPA than your other college's classes. As a result, you wind up with two different GPAs depending on how you calculate it: You can either make all classes worth the same amount of credits (save for classes that are always worth more, such as lab sciences), or you can calculate using the raw hours that each school assigned to their classes. Unless you always got the same grade in every class, one of these methods is going to net you a higher GPA than the other, and OP is wanting to know what his "real" GPA is before he's in the middle of filling out his AMCAS.

 

[Captain Sisko]

I believe what OP is asking is how do you handle credit hours when you attended two universities that had different philosophies on how many credits their average classes were worth.

I have the same concern as OP. My first college usually gave 3 hours/class. My second college, however, gave 4 hours/class. They were both on the semester system, but the second one just thought so highly of itself that they handed out an extra credit hour per class to "represent how hard our classes are" (their words).

Normally the consequence of such a policy would only be that a person could hit full time taking only 3 classes instead of 4 (which is the intended effect), but when you transfer to a school with a different credit policy, you get a second consequence which is that the classes you took at your 4 hour/class university count more towards your GPA than your other college's classes. As a result, you wind up with two different GPAs depending on how you calculate it: You can either make all classes worth the same amount of credits (save for classes that are always worth more, such as lab sciences), or you can calculate using the raw hours that each school assigned to their classes. Unless you always got the same grade in every class, one of these methods is going to net you a higher GPA than the other, and OP is wanting to know what his "real" GPA is before he's in the middle of filling out his AMCAS.

Yeah I see what you mean. I don't think amcas can do anything for that if there's no conversion factor in the transcript. There are so many foibles that each different school has that it probably comes out in the wash. My undergrad didn't use +/- and it's a common assumption on the pre-allo board that neither difficulty of institution nor difficulty of major can offset a lower gpa. Sorry that doesn't help, op