Trascript Question: Shows grade but no hours

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moto_za

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I took a few graduate level courses as pass/fall and on my official transcript is shows that I passed the courses but does not show any hours/credits received. When I complete my AMCAS application should I leave the credit part blank? Will this be looked negatively by med schools? Thank you!

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Hi,

one of my friends who did postbacc work before applying to med school had a similar question.

He resolved it by seeing the general catalog of the univ, it shows the units on there.i should also add that 2 interviewers asked him why he choose to take a few classes on a pass/np basis; so be prepared to answer that.

Best of luck with your Apps🙂 are you applying for the first time this year?
 
Thank you for the response! I will be actually reapplying this year. The classes that I took were only offered as pass/fail. I hope AMCAS will allow me to just enter the credits on my own by looking at the catalog since it is not on my transcript.
 
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I took a few graduate level courses as pass/fall and on my official transcript is shows that I passed the courses but does not show any hours/credits received. When I complete my AMCAS application should I leave the credit part blank? Will this be looked negatively by med schools? Thank you!

These courses will not be counted in your GPA, regardless of what your transcript says. If you read the AMCAS rules about calculating GPAs (part of the official AMCAS handbook, which is available on their website), you'll see that courses taken P/F, C/NC, etc. are excluded from the AMCAS GPA. I had a couple of these courses on my own transcript, and the AMCAS reviewer recorded them as zero credit hours. This didn't mean my school didn't give me credit, just that AMCAS didn't use them in its calculations.

I don't think the AMCAS application will let you leave a field blank, so you'll have to enter something there (I would advise a zero). Regardless of what you enter, though, if your transcript looks the way you describe it, I bet AMCAS will change it to a zero. (This kind of change is considered a routine correction and doesn't count against you.)

I don't think this issue is going to affect you at all. First of all, grad grades go into a separate GPA bucket, and frankly get almost no attention from med schools. Second, even if anyone did care about your grad GPA, you're better off with P/F excluded if the alternative is to assign it a point value other than 4.0. (Some colleges, for example, assume that P is equivalent to a C for GPA purposes.)

I have an MBA degree from a school that gives H/HP/P/LP/F grades, which according to the AMCAS website is equivalent to ABCDF. But the person who reviewed my transcript changed them all to P/F, which resulted in a grad GPA of NA. Regardless, I got into med school anyway.
 
^ Thank you for the response. Helpful information to know. 🙂
 
These courses will not be counted in your GPA, regardless of what your transcript says. If you read the AMCAS rules about calculating GPAs (part of the official AMCAS handbook, which is available on their website), you'll see that courses taken P/F, C/NC, etc. are excluded from the AMCAS GPA. I had a couple of these courses on my own transcript, and the AMCAS reviewer recorded them as zero credit hours. This didn't mean my school didn't give me credit, just that AMCAS didn't use them in its calculations.

I don't think the AMCAS application will let you leave a field blank, so you'll have to enter something there (I would advise a zero). Regardless of what you enter, though, if your transcript looks the way you describe it, I bet AMCAS will change it to a zero. (This kind of change is considered a routine correction and doesn't count against you.)

I don't think this issue is going to affect you at all. First of all, grad grades go into a separate GPA bucket, and frankly get almost no attention from med schools. Second, even if anyone did care about your grad GPA, you're better off with P/F excluded if the alternative is to assign it a point value other than 4.0. (Some colleges, for example, assume that P is equivalent to a C for GPA purposes.)

I have an MBA degree from a school that gives H/HP/P/LP/F grades, which according to the AMCAS website is equivalent to ABCDF. But the person who reviewed my transcript changed them all to P/F, which resulted in a grad GPA of NA. Regardless, I got into med school anyway.

Hey Student1799,

I'm planning to take a few graduate courses in 1 year and i asked the question about p/f, and my premed advisor told me that adcoms prefer you have a grade for it; and that med schools do like to see grad course grades beacuse p/f is assumed as a C (like you said); but your right--it won't affect your gpa 🙂

I don't think putting in a 0 > the real units, because your putting in less than what you did and your not allowed to exclude anything from your transcript.;;
 
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I took a few graduate level courses as pass/fall and on my official transcript is shows that I passed the courses but does not show any hours/credits received. When I complete my AMCAS application should I leave the credit part blank? Will this be looked negatively by med schools? Thank you!
Yes, you will just leave the column for OT hours (official transcript hours) blank. If no hours were reported, you have nothing to put there, right?

The best advice I can give you is to get an official copy of all your transcripts before you begin to fill out AMCAS. Enter the courses into AMCAS *exactly* as they appear on your official transcript, even if it's not exactly how things were done in real life. AMCAS doesn't ask the school how things were done at the time; they look at your official transcript, and that's what they use to check your coursework.

There shouldn't be a problem if you enter exactly what is reported on your official transcripts. My entire UG transcript has no grades and no credit hours (and also no designations of semesters when the classes were taken). I arbitrarily chose to assign classes to different years based on the order the registrar had listed them on my transcript, which did not by any means correspond to the order in which I had actually taken them. I left the OT hours and OT grade columns blank, since both were N/A in my case. It's kind of cool--credit hours-wise, it looks like I went straight from being a college freshman to being a grad student. 😛
 
Hey Student1799,

I'm planning to take a few graduate courses in 1 year and i asked the question about p/f, and my premed advisor told me that adcoms prefer you have a grade for it; and that med schools do like to see grad course grades beacuse p/f is assumed as a C (like you said); but your right--it won't affect your gpa 🙂

I'd say that if you have a choice, it's usually better to take a course for a grade, especially if it's a science course. (It shows you're taking the class seriously rather than messing around.)

But, as I said earlier, I don't think it really makes a lot of difference. I was told by my adviser that med schools assume there's rampant grade inflation in grad school ("everyone gets an A"), so even if you do really well they're not going to attach much importance to it.

Honestly, it would probably look better on your app if you took upper-level undergrad science courses rather than grad. I know it seems strange, but that's how med schools look at it.
 
I'd say that if you have a choice, it's usually better to take a course for a grade, especially if it's a science course. (It shows you're taking the class seriously rather than messing around.)

But, as I said earlier, I don't think it really makes a lot of difference. I was told by my adviser that med schools assume there's rampant grade inflation in grad school ("everyone gets an A"), so even if you do really well they're not going to attach much importance to it.

Honestly, it would probably look better on your app if you took upper-level undergrad science courses rather than grad. I know it seems strange, but that's how med schools look at it.

that's very intreresting🙂 never saw it like that, but it sounds true.
 
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