WGPA for graduate students

[Guest stallion001]

Does anyone have any idea of the WGPA cutoff for grad students in the past few years? How many grad students they interview? And what is the % that they accept to the first year class.

 

Also what is the scoring that is used to assess grad students i.e. I've heard that you get 1 point for abstract, 2 for in press, 3 for publication. I am aware of the process that they use to invite applicants to the interview (it's on their web site), but they're very secretive regarding the fine elements of this process.

 

Admin at Ottawa U will not answer any of my questions or inquiries - I guess they;re not allowed to disclose such info for some reason.

 

Thanks

[Guest Kirsteen]

Hi stallion001,

 

I thought I'd read on the UofO website the other day that the graduate WGPA cut-off was 3.3, i.e., you had to have achieved a 3.3 per their WGPA formula in order to be considered further in the admissions process. From there you had to have an A-average in your graduate coursework to proceed further. Once those hurdles were leaped then it was on to the assessment of graduate productivity.

 

As to the point system used by UofO to evaluate graduate productivity, I don't know. It seems reasonable that they may include other activities associated with graduate work in the process, akin to the sorts of activities used to assess individuals for potential tenure-track positions, e.g., teaching experience, lectures delivered, etc.

 

A quick question while I'm here: can anyone provide some examples of situations in which a researcher would publish an abstract yet not an article, aside from within conference publications, poster presentations, etc.?

 

Cheers,

Kirsteen

[Guest stallion001]

Hi,

 

I believe that you can only publish an abstract if you attended a conference or a meeting.

 

Going back to the WGPA cutoff for grad students, after you make the 3.3 cutoff and have maintained an A average in your grad courses, the applicant is further assessed by the graduate review subcommittee (they look at your extracurriculars and research productivity). The web site then goes on to say "The subcommittee then considers the overal qulity and size of the select group of graduate applicants to determine the minimum criteria fora ctually receiving an interview invitation"

--- I want to know what the minimum criteria has been in the past few years. I'm sure they have a ranking in terms of whether your a PhD student or MSc student, number of publication (or points in this case for types of pulications) and extracurricular activities.

 

Then when you're actually invited to an interview, they score your performance there too and I'm guessing put you on a ranking scale.

 

The final criteria for acceptance to the school is "The WGPA used to position these graduate applicants on the rank order list of offers will be calculated as follows: 2 + [0.5Xundergrad WGPA]"

 

I believe they use the interview score and your GPA to offer acceptance.

 

BUT WHAT THEY WON'T TELL YOU IS WHAT THE AVERAGE WGPA OR CUTOFF HAS BEEN IN RECENT YEARS.

 

Is there anyone out there who can give me the James Bond version of exactly goes on behind those doors!

 

P.S. Kirsteen: are you a grad. student. I hope I'm not being too intrusive but how many publications will you have before the interview process. Do you know any other grad students that are applying - what is their publication productivity like?? My friend is a PhD student and is applying this year and has 4 publications and a whole bunch of abstracts, if the graduate pool is comparable to his achievents, I'm afraid I'm in trouble!

[Guest Kirsteen]

Hi there stallion001,

 

Cheers for the response re: the abstract question.

 

This is my first year applying to Ottawa and I'm not as up to speed on their admissions process for graduate students since I've not really met too many folks along the way who have had extra insights to the review process there. So I can't really help to provide accurate illumination. However, it seems reasonable that they may pool M.Sc. and PhD. students and then generate an average score for graduate productivity for that pool; after all, there usually are quite a few more M.Sc. applicants to all medical schools than there are PhD. applicants, so the average scores should be reflective of the pool. Now, if the M.Sc. students are just a bunch of publishing stars (akin to your PhD pal), then that's a different bag o' monkeys!

 

Speaking of which, I was having a chat with someone about something related the other day: the opportunities that bench-based M.Sc. students have for publication. I am a M.Sc. student in Epidemiology, and my "bench" looks a lot more like a small Library of Congress with a desktop, rather than a repository for Northern buffer and microarrays! Judging by my experience in various basic science labs versus an Epidemiology-type research setting it seems that the latter provides a much greater and more efficient route to publication. Any thoughts?

 

stallion001, some specifics: I am a 2x(grad student) in that I have an MBA (which, incidentally is relatively useless unless unaccompanied by another graduate degree, when applying to UofO) and as mentioned above, am currently studying Epidemiology at UofT. With respect to publications and the like, my MBA adds very little CV meat except a thesis based on a business plan for a non-invasive biopsy device. However, since tacking the MBA tail to my name I've managed to generate a bunch of work of different forms: two poster presentation/abstracts; one article (essay) published in an international health journal (first author); one primary research article currently in review at the BMJ (second author); a small collection of abstracts (~4) currently being reviewed for upcoming conferences and a couple of presentations/talks that I gave last year on biotechnology/genetics.

 

I don't really know too many other graduate students who are applying to UofO, but again, most of the graduate applicants I do know who are applying to other schools (mainly M.Sc. students in the basic sciences) did not seem to have too much by way of publications. They just didn't seem to have ideal opportunities to get things moving into print for a panoply of reasons including: less-than-supportive supervisors; projects that went awry; or projects that went fabulously but which had lengthy timeframes to completion.

 

Cheers,

Kirsteen

[Guest ekimike]

I am a graduate student applicant to the University of Ottawa and I am waiting for their request for supplementary information. I must say that last year I was disappointed by the way that my application to the school was handled. In mid-February of last year I received notice that I would interview at Ottawa in March. Due to the fact that my undergraduate WGPA was competitive amongst the undergraduate pool of applicants I was interviewed as an undergraduate applicant, and no request was made for any supplementary graduate information. I am hoping that this year is different and that I will be treated as a graduate applicant, as I believe the strength of my application lies in the combination of my undergraduate and graduate school merits. I hold an M.Sc. degree from the University of Toronto. During my graduate studies I published two first author papers in high impact scientific journals, and presented my work at two international conferences - one oral presentation and one poster presentation. In years past I believe that the graduate applicant "points" system for interviews has been: 2 points for first author publication, 1 point for partial authorship, 1 point for conference abstracts, and 1 point for a letter from your supervisor, needing 10 points in total to be selected for interview. I truly hope that Ottawa considers my graduate credentials this year, as I think that their selection process actually worked to my disadvantage last year. Good luck to all of the graduate applicants!!!

 

 

-ekimike

[Guest stallion001]

ikemike,

 

I just wanted to know how you know the scoring system for graduate students? Was it from a reliable source? Further, is 10 point the cutoff for inviting appllicants for interviews? What if say one person only publishes 2 articles in very reutable journals - giving them 5 points (extra point for supervisor letter) and another person publishes 10 abstracts (giving them 11 points). As you can see, although both may have been productive, having published two papers is certainly much more flashy than going to a whole bunch of conference (although I'm not saying that going to conferences, without publishing papers is any indication of how well a graduate student is doing considering nature of thesis, right time right place etc.). I'm confused now. I also heard that they give 2 extra points to PhD students!!! Since the admissions committee won't give out any info on this, I guess we'll just wait and see.

 

Anyway, I heard that being interveiw among undergrads is much better as the graduate screening process can be quite competitive.

 

Good Luck, hope everything goes well for you this year.

[Guest K2Optimist]

Hi there,

 

After reading this thread, and considering UWO admission policy, would you say that it is better for an applicant with a below-the-cutoff-gpa to go back and do 2 years of undergrad courses rather than spend 2 years doing a Master's degree?

[Guest Sil]

I went back and did 3 more years of undergrad before applying. I think it really depends on you. After my first undergrad and having done some research, I knew that I did not want to do grad work. So, I went back and took some more university. But if you really like research and can see it is a second career choice (in case meds does not work out) go for it. I chose my second undergrad as a backup to med.