Retaking courses

[cdnpremed]

I'm in my last year of undergrad in Canada. I took two gap years in the middle of undergrad, and will be writing my MCAT this summer before applying to schools internationally next year.

Due to a variety of reasons, I haven't had an academically-efficient start to my last winter semester, and I expect to finish my semester with very poor passing grades in 2 of my 5 winter courses.

The winter course drop deadline is at the end of this week, and I'm considering whether to complete two poor grades, or drop them and complete my bachelors as a part-time student in an extra year. A middle-way option might be to complete them anyway, and then take an extra-year to redo these two courses while also taking additional courses to perhaps improve my GPA.

Could I please get some feedback about which path to take? I plan to apply as a Canadian student to the US and other countries.

Thank you all in advance!

[frenchpress]

58 minutes ago, cdnpremed said:

I'm in my last year of undergrad in Canada. I took two gap years in the middle of undergrad, and will be writing my MCAT this summer before applying to schools internationally next year.

Due to a variety of reasons, I haven't had an academically-efficient start to my last winter semester, and I expect to finish my semester with very poor passing grades in 2 of my 5 winter courses.

The winter course drop deadline is at the end of this week, and I'm considering whether to complete two poor grades, or drop them and complete my bachelors as a part-time student in an extra year. A middle-way option might be to complete them anyway, and then take an extra-year to redo these two courses while also taking additional courses to perhaps improve my GPA.

Could I please get some feedback about which path to take? I plan to apply as a Canadian student to the US and other countries.

Thank you all in advance!

 

Edit: Sorry, I just reread your post and realized you’re talking about only applying schools outside Canada. So my original response was not super relevant. 

But still, more information about your stats and GPA overall may be helpful. Is low GPA/competitiveness your main reason for not applying in Canada?

Edited March 5, 2019 by frenchpress

[cdnpremed]

2 minutes ago, frenchpress said:

One semester with a couple of withdrawals is typically not considered a bad thing for most Canadian schools (I am not sure about American schools). In fact, in my experience in undergraduate advising/admissions generally, we often viewed students choosing to withdraw from courses as showing much more maturity and insight than students who struggled through and got a poor grade. It’s common for students to have a bad semester or to encounter personal life situations beyond their control that make it hard to keep up with school, so that’s not really a red flag. Multiple semesters with withdrawals on the other hand, would be a potential red flag. The benefit of dropping them now is avoiding having the poor grades pull down your gpa, and GPA is a big factor in admissions in canada.

But the other thing to consider though will be rules around full courses loads for GPA calculations etc. These vary a lot by school, so the best choice here will also depend on where in Canada you’ll be applying and what your GPA is like otherwise - can you give us more info?

Hi there, thank you for responding.

I think you make a good point about showing maturity and insight. 

Actually as I mentioned in my post, I'll be applying not in Canada, but to the US and other schools internationally, like Ireland, Australia, and the Caribbean. 

My GPA is a 3.4 without these two courses. I understand this could be higher, so perhaps another part-time year will help. I intend to prepare well for the MCAT that I'll be writing this summer. 

[Chels1267]

What was said above still counts, make sure that whatever schools you want to apply to do not have rules about having a full course load in order to apply. Also look into whether or not these schools use the first or second grade for repeated classes, I know some schools here in Canada use the first grade. Also make sure you look into prereqs as I believe US schools have those. Otherwise keeping as high a GPA as possible will be necessary for the US. Consider where you want/can do residency before applying internationally as well.