How competitive are Canadians at US Dental Schools?

[Guest Hydeus]

I was just wondering how competitive Canadian students are in the states. There are many more people applying to dentistry south of the border and it seems to me like only a few Canadians are accepted each year to a few schools. If we have a 3.4 average, would we be considered over a US student who has the same average?

[dentshopeful]

I was just wondering how competitive Canadian students are in the states. There are many more people applying to dentistry south of the border and it seems to me like only a few Canadians are accepted each year to a few schools. If we have a 3.4 average, would we be considered over a US student who has the same average?

 

I am very interested in this myself... I know that US schools have a different way of calculating gpa, so in terms of a canadian gpa, what would be competitive for the us schools, on average...

[Freddy]

good question. If anyone has some input/experience here please share with the rest of us. It seems to be getting increasingly difficult to get into Canadian schools.

[curiousking]

I graduated from UBC and our school uses percentages

In US GPA

if you get A- (80% in UBC), A or A+ you have 4.0 for that course

if you get B+ (ie 77%) you get 3.5 for that course

If you get B or B- you get 3.0 for that course

C+, C or C- would get you a 2.0 and so on

 

What people do in US is that they add the GPA for individual courses and divided by the number of courses you take that term

 

for example

if you have 5 courses this term and your grades are A, A-, B+, A and A

(4.0 x4 + 3.5)/5 = 3.9 that would be your GPA

 

This system has it's advantage and disadvantages

 

for example, my overall UBC average is 80%..

and theoretically I should get a 4.0 GPA

However, I did better on some courses than the other ones...

ie. 75% on Microbiology and 85% on cell biology

yes, the average of those two courses are 80%, but in terms of US GPA, this is only a 3.75

 

The message is..try to get 80% above in all courses..

If you have staright As then you will get 4.0

Don't try to get over 80%, because it's useless,

I got 98% in one course, and I still only end up with 4.0 for that course...

 

However, if you are applying dental schools like UBC,

then percentage does matter

UBC uses % NOT GPA

[rla_z]

I graduated from UBC and our school uses percentages

In US GPA

if you get A- (80% in UBC), A or A+ you have 4.0 for that course

if you get B+ (ie 77%) you get 3.5 for that course

If you get B or B- you get 3.0 for that course

C+, C or C- would get you a 2.0 and so on

 

What people do in US is that they add the GPA for individual courses and divided by the number of courses you take that term

 

for example

if you have 5 courses this term and your grades are A, A-, B+, A and A

(4.0 x4 + 3.5)/5 = 3.9 that would be your GPA

 

This system has it's advantage and disadvantages

 

for example, my overall UBC average is 80%..

and theoretically I should get a 4.0 GPA

However, I did better on some courses than the other ones...

ie. 75% on Microbiology and 85% on cell biology

yes, the average of those two courses are 80%, but in terms of US GPA, this is only a 3.75

 

The message is..try to get 80% above in all courses..

If you have staright As then you will get 4.0

Don't try to get over 80%, because it's useless,

I got 98% in one course, and I still only end up with 4.0 for that course...

 

However, if you are applying dental schools like UBC,

then percentage does matter

UBC uses % NOT GPA

 

Holy crap that's a really generous scale for us UBC students lol.

What about courses that are worth different amount of credits? Most courses are three credit but some of my courses are 1,2 or 4 so does that factor into the calculation somehow?

[Guest Hydeus]

If we have the same GPA in US conversion as an American student, would they be given priority though?

[juba]

It depends on the school. If it is a private school, it doesn't matter where you are from.

[Contach]

It depends on the school. If it is a private school, it doesn't matter where you are from.

 

or so they say......

[slacker24]

I graduated from UBC and our school uses percentages

In US GPA

if you get A- (80% in UBC), A or A+ you have 4.0 for that course

if you get B+ (ie 77%) you get 3.5 for that course

If you get B or B- you get 3.0 for that course

C+, C or C- would get you a 2.0 and so on

 

What people do in US is that they add the GPA for individual courses and divided by the number of courses you take that term

 

for example

if you have 5 courses this term and your grades are A, A-, B+, A and A

(4.0 x4 + 3.5)/5 = 3.9 that would be your GPA

 

This system has it's advantage and disadvantages

 

for example, my overall UBC average is 80%..

and theoretically I should get a 4.0 GPA

However, I did better on some courses than the other ones...

ie. 75% on Microbiology and 85% on cell biology

yes, the average of those two courses are 80%, but in terms of US GPA, this is only a 3.75

 

The message is..try to get 80% above in all courses..

If you have staright As then you will get 4.0

Don't try to get over 80%, because it's useless,

I got 98% in one course, and I still only end up with 4.0 for that course...

 

However, if you are applying dental schools like UBC,

then percentage does matter

UBC uses % NOT GPA

 

 

If that conversion is true, that sucks. I've attended a U.S. university as well as a Canadian one. It was way harder getting an A in the US then it was getting an A- in Canada.

 

I needed an 90%+ to get an A and only an 80% to get that A-. Furthermore, When ever I got a 87% in a course, it'll only count as a B (3.0).

[Contach]

Um... I'm pretty sure AADSAS (the application service for American Dental schools) calculates your GPA two ways. I know this because this year I applied to American Dental Schools.

 

first way: they make A-/A/A+ all = A and A= 4.0

and B-/B/B+ all = B and B = 3.0 as aforementioned, they call this GPA w/o (for without +/-'s)

 

second way: they discriminate between an A-, an A and an A+,

an A- = 3.7, A = 4.0 and A+ = 4.3 (yes that's right, you can get over a 4.0 GPA).

 

The reason for this is because some American schools don't offer A+s, or A-s they only offer As, whereas other schools discriminate between the different levels of As. Thus it wouldn't be fair to pool them together... So.. when I (and anyone else) applies to American schools, they get a summary table of their GPA w/ and GPA w/o. For me, my GPA w/ was 0.9 points higher than my GPA w/out becuase I had more A+s than I did A-s, for someone with more A-s than A+s the GPA without would be higher... make sense? didn't lose you? good.

 

To add to this confusion, they also break down your GPA into those courses that are Science-based (Biology, Chemistry, Physics) and all the rest. So you also get a sGPA (science GPA) and cGPA (cumulative GPA). They look at both these numbers too.

 

Now, I know that the next question will be: so which do they use, or which do they weigh higher?

 

You won't get a good answer out of anyone for this question - no one knows. and the reason why this is an acceptable answer is because the American process is a lot more subjective than Canadian admissions. For example, UBC plugs your numbers into a spreadsheet and outputs your place. They chose how they want to weigh each of the components, and Bam, you have a rank compared to everyone else. Whereas American schools don't do this - they may do this to determine who gets an interview, such as they just input GPA and DAT scores and the top of the list gets first dibs at the next interview slots.. But other than that, they look at you holistically and they look at all the components of your application,

 

Category Subject Hours Quality

Points GPA Quality

Points w/o GPA w/o

Undergraduate BCP

Sciences

Non-Sciences

Cumulative

 

Graduate BCP 0 0 0 0 0

Sciences 0 0 0 0 0

Non-Sciences 0 0 0 0 0

Cumulative 0 0 0 0 0

 

Cumulative BCP

Sciences

Non-Sciences

GPA Overall

 

(This is what AADSAS gives you. ) I removed my numbers.

[Guest Hydeus]

Wow, thank you very much. I appreciate all the information you've given us! Do you know if they look at upward trends at all? I've been told on forums that they do, but my dentist, who graduated from an American dental school said that they don't...so I was wondering if you knew one clear answer to this.

[n00b]

If we have a 3.4 average, would we be considered over a US student who has the same average?

 

why would they? that makes no sense.