Prereq GPA?

[Guest qua]

Lately I've been hearing people talking a lot about how med schools use a different gpa calculation which includes your grades for the prereq courses. Is this true? Do all unviersities do this? Which ones? I'm kinda getting worried about my marks for non-prereq courses are generally a lot better.

Any info about this would be great. Thanks a lot

[Guest eman05]

U of A does, and they actually weigh your pre-reqs significantly more than your cumulative GPA.

 

From their website:

Cumulative average of university years 10% (approx.)

Prerequisite course 25% (approx.)

MCAT 15% (approx.)

Interview 25% (approx.)

Personal attributes 15% (approx.)

Reference letters 5% (approx.)

MCAT writing sample 5% (approx.)

 

www.med.ualberta.ca/ugme/...medfaq.cfm

 

I'm not sure what other school do as well.

[Guest byjude]

This is generally practised at US schools, but is less common in Canada. Most Canadian schools only look at your average as a whole (your average from 2-4 of the years, depending on school), without regard for which classes compose it. Some schools may look at your prerequisite GPA more subjectively, but don't have an absolute cutoff (I think McGill uses a strategy along these lines, though I'm not sure whether they are looking for minimum marks or just as a flag to see if you are weak in this area).

 

Alberta is the only Canadian school I know of that puts more weight on prereq GPA than overall GPA. All of the Ontario schools do not differentiate between prerequisite averages and non-prereq averages (especially since they are increasingly liberalizing their expectations for which prereq courses you should take).

[Guest Kirsteen]

Hi there qua,

 

In addition to Alberta, UBC is another school that currently places weight on their fairly substantial list of pre-requisite courses. (Supposedly they place more emphasis on the pre-requisite GPA and the last-60-credit-average than they do on the overall GPA.)

 

Cheers,

Kirsteen

[Guest aneliz]

UWO does not look at grades from the pre-reqs...as long as you passed the courses, that is good enough for UWO...and marks from pre-req courses will not impact on your status at all (good or bad). (unless of course they are part of a full-time year that you are using to meet the GPA cut-off!!! )