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Med Schools GPA calculaion for Nursing students applying (RN)


Redface

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I’ll try to answer what I can.

1. You will have to contact the individual schools you plan to apply to and see how they assess pass/fail classes. Schools also have different ways of calculating gpa in general. Some schools look at all the grades you’ve ever gotten, some look at last 2 years or best 2 years, some drop a certain number of your lowest grades based on full time semesters completed. The only school which I know for sure how they calculate gpa for nursing is Dal, who calculates based on your last 60 graded credits of 2000-4000 level.

2. Most med schools don’t require any specific prerequisites at all for admission. If you are applying to a school that requires prerequisites I suggest you ask them what the best way to get them would be. Some schools will not look at courses taken outside of an actual degree program, so to be safe you would need to enrol in another undergrad but again check with the school. As to how the gpa will be calculated with a 5th year, it depends on the school.

3. Generally there is forgiveness built into the gpa calculation already so if you’re asking if they would just ignore the first time you did second year and then drop your worst year on top of that? I highly doubt it, unless you have the grades exempt from your transcript by the registrar of your current school for compassionate reasons. Generally if you repeat a course, they will calculate the gpa based on both times you took it, but once again clarify that with the school. You would be “penalized” in the sense it could affect your gpa. Schools who look at last 2 years basically don’t care what happened before that so you wouldn’t be ‘penalized’ at all for those.

What province are you from and what schools do you plan to apply to?

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Hey appreciate the detailed answer. I live in Ontario, GTA area, and plan to apply to all the school in province and out of province. The school I am mainly aiming for is Western (because of their GPA policy of only using your best 2 years) and University of Alberta as they drop your lowest year grades.

 

TBH though, I might just do a second undergraduate degree after I get my RN license. Most probably will have a 3.7 by the time Im done so ya. Also Nursing isnt the best path to get to med school....very subjective and so that makes it hard to get high GPA

 

 

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  • 1 month later...

Hey there,

All the information that Rahvin13 provided is accurate from my searches, other than most med schools I applied to had prerequisites, but they were usually fairly simplistic (English courses, etc). There were several Canadian schools I was ineligible to apply for due to course load requirements and lack of chem/biochem courses.

The other option is Graduate School after becoming an RN. This would move you forward in health care instead of forcing you to start another undergrad. Also, I disagree that Nursing is a bad route to get to med school. It definitely isn't the easiest, but can be quite beneficial. I know several people that are in Med School with a BScN as their undergrad and I'm currently applying with my BScN with a GPA of 3.95. If you keep up the good work then this route will work out, it may be difficult doing MCAT with the decreased science background but anything is possible.

 

All the best

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  • 3 months later...

From personal experience, I know that UBC only considers your graded courses in their AQ pre-interview assessment, but considers all courses (including pass/fail) when assessing whether or not you have taken a full course load.  This may be somewhat dated as I started medical school in 2012.

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Hey Redface and medisforme,

I applied these past two years (2017, 2018) into medical school from nursing, applying to a total of 4 medical schools in Canada. None of the schools that I applied to used clinical courses (ie pass/fail courses) when determining the GPA of the applicant.

All the best

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