The GPA: Its role in medical school admissions and what you can do about it.

(1) Many medical schools use GPA is used to screen out candidates. Some use certain GPA cut-offs others use "secret" formulas that incorporate GPA and MCAT scores to initially screen out applicants before letting actual people to look at individual applications. If your GPA is not up to sniff, you might not get a "fair hearing" despite your all other accomplishments. In fact some schools will not even send you their secondary applications if you do not pass their "cut-off" test for GPA and MCAT, which is good in a way since you will not have to waste $100 applying to a school where they will not even look at your application.

(2) Medical schools look especially closely at your science GPA and the grades you received in required "premed" science classes, which in most cases closely track your science GPA. The admission committees know that the premed requirements are tough and they use them to gauge your ability to do "hard labor" in medical schools.

You say it is unfair. I say I agree. I've met people who are damn smart and who would make extremely good doctors but who were dealt with bad cards in life--family situation precluded them from devoting enough time to studying or they had to pay their way through college.

You can attempt to explain your circumstances, and hopefully medical schools will eat it up. This is more likely to occur if you had a slip in one semester but performed well all the other time. In other circumstances, you may want to consider some backup or alternative options, which may include getting a graduate degree (Masters' for example) and doing really well so that you can show that you can indeed do well academically. Another option is to apply either to DO Medical Schools, which award Doctor of Osteopathy (DO) instead of Doctor of Medicine (MD). You can apply to MD and DO schools simultaneously, but they require you to go through totally different application processes, even though both accept (and require) MCAT. Doing really well on MCAT may to some degree improve your chances but as I said before GPA is pretty important and high MCAT score may or may not cut it alone.

The advantage of applying to DO schools is that they seem to be flexible on evaluating applicants. The disadvantage is that you get DO, which is supposedly nearly identical to MD, but because there are very few DO's and no one really knows much of them it carries some "stigma" with it--in a sense that you will probably have to explain that you are "just a doctor" to a lot of people.

The secrets for getting high GPA?

Well are there secrets for getting good grades? If you ask your parents they will probably tell you to go back to your room and study harder. They are right. But I think this is not the end of the story.

Some of what I will say next is very controversial, so you may want to read with your eyes shut.

"Attitude is Everything."

Studying day after day can eat you up really fast. The BIGGEST secret I know to keeping yourself sane while spending significant portion of your life in the library is "EXERCISE." Really, spend an hour or half an hour a day or every other day in the gym, go jogging, go to the pool. Keep yourself physically fit. My experience is that working out actually affects and improves your thinking--it gets your blood flowing and brings the much needed oxygen to you brain.. It also gives a boost of energy that is especially needed during the exams. You cannot realize how valuable and important exercise is until you have done it for some time. So, Just Do It!

I know it sounds ridiculous, but instead of cramming 12 hours a day for five days during the finals, spend one hour each day at the gym. I bet you will immediately feel the difference. You will not lose that hour because you will in fact be studying more productively the other 11 hours. In fact, I have read a study sometime ago that one of the common characteristics of very successful high-level business executives (who usually work 70-80 hours a week) is that they exercise and particularly jog regularly.

"Time management is at the roots of success."

You need to choose a setting where you study best. I found from experience that oftentimes the worst way to study is in a group or in proximity to people. You end up talking a lot, answering questions from people who have not done the work and working on areas that are not your weakness. It is a waste of time. Out of two hours of study you may only get 15 minutes of productive information going to your brain. I'm not advocating that you become a sociopath. In fact I think having social life is essential to good performance. What I'm saying is that it may be well worth it to separate your academics from your socialization. You will be much better off if you spend two hours intensely studying and then spend two hours socializing than if you spend four hours mixing socializing with studying. At the end of four hours of social-studying you will have neither learned much nor socialized too well.

"Set priorities. Always keep your short-term and long-term goals in sight."

"To accomplish your goals, you must accept the trade-offs. You cannot have it all and eat it too!"

You must always keep your long term and short-term goals in sight. You must also realize that oftentimes your goals are not the same as the goals of your friends. This mean that you cannot always do what your friends are doing. To accomplish your goals you must accept the trade-offs. In addition, it is important to note that different goals require different trade-offs. Again I'm not advocating that you become a sociopath. What I am saying is that if your goal is to get into medical school and your friend's goal is to be a big-shot Wall Street broker, you must realize that you may have to study when he or she goes partying. Why? For one, because if you always do what he or she does, you may end up being a big-shot Wall Street broker instead of being a doctor. Different goals require different trade-offs.

How can I get high GPA? How can I raise my GPA?

First, as I have mentioned the grades you get in premed requirements are very important. For that reason you might want to take them one at a time and do real well on them. In fact I recommend that you do NOT take Orgo and Bio together. It is a lot of work and your GPA is much more important than getting over these classes.

Some people are also known to have taken the hard "premed" classes at schools other than where they get their BA/BS and where the standards are lower--just be careful with that because this might raise a flag on your application. In the best case you will be asked why you took a class at a different school during the interview and hopefully you will give a satisfactory explanation. In fact I took a few classes at a local community college as part of a college program in my high-school's and I was asked why I took two classes at that college--and these were neither science nor required classes.

Another alternative is to take the hard premed classes during the summer. Beware though that summer classes are very intense and they cover material very fast--so there is no opportunity to slack-off. If you don't do the work for a few days in classes such as Orgo, Bio or Physics during the summer session you might get screwed up big time grade-wise whereas you can get away with it scott-free during the regular semester.

If you have already taken your premed requirements and did really poorly in one or two classes, which can totally ruin your GPA, I suggest that you find out the policies of your school regarding retaking classes. If your school totally removes all traces of your previous grade from your transcript as I know some schools do then by all means retake the class. Even though you're required to list all classes you took and retook in college on your medical school application, if they are not listed on your transcript there is no reason to report them. (I'm not suggesting that you lie on your application--memory is a fragile thing and if the grade is not listed on your transcript, when you fill out your AMCAS application you just may forget to remember that you took it before and got a really bad grade.)

On the other hand, the school I went to, for example, will not remove the previous grade from the transcript if you retake the class. They just added the new grade along with the old grade. In this case, you may still want to retake that one science class you screwed up just to prove to the admissions that you know your stuff. On the other hand, you may just try to maximize your GPA. In particular if your science GPA is low, you might want to consider taking some of the science classes that are commonly taken by the athletes at your school--no prejudice--but athletes tend to have a sixth sense for easy classes. Don't know why. In other words take the low-level easy classes from science departments (Biology, chemistry, physics, math). Usually these do not satisfy requirements for science majors but you will not have to do much work for these classes and you will still be able to list them as "science" classes for the purposes of your science GPA calculations when applying to medical schools.

Now I do not recommend that you waste your college career taking this kind of classes. It is much better to take "good" classes and do well in them. But when you're in a desperate situation and need to pull up your GPA--this is a good way to go.

More Coming up soon.

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