Medical Education US

Hi,
I was wondering how much medical schools rely on the weighted GPA that the AMCAS uses, which gives much more weight to classes taken in the sophomore and junior years of college. My unweighted GPA isn't all that good, a 3.0, but the weighted one falls to somewhere around a miserable 2.6. My freshman and high school AP grades were very good, but after that I lost interest in college, thinking that I would never get a job that needed a degree. I developed a bad habit of skipping the boring classes to go to the library and get myself an education. I straightened up considerably in my senior year, but as far as I can tell the AMCAS doesn't consider senior or postgraduate grades.

After seven years out of college, I'll be returning to take my premed requirements and retake a statistics class I failed out of pure laziness. If medical schools only look at the weighted GPA, I've got no chance, but if I get the more recent grades included in my application and do well on the MCATs I think I'll be all right. The med school I'm most interested in, University of Washington, seems to accept quite a few non-traditional students who did poorly in college initially but returned for their premed classes. I've also got three and a half years of volunteer experience in various Christian missions and NGOs, which should count for something.
Thank you for your advice,
Andrew

Andrew,

I have never before heard of GPA being weighted more heavily for Junior year vs Freshman year by AMCAS. I believe this may be something that only University of Washington does as a way to screen out people from receiving a secondary application. I doubt they would ignore graduate coursework. You should contact University of Washington and ask them if you would be offered a secondary application if you do well in your pre-med courses and on your MCAT. Based on what they say on their website, though, they use this weighted GPA as a way to screen applicants.

Interesting concept and I wonder if they based this approach on data. It would be interesting to see if they found a correlation between junior year grades and medical school performance relative to freshman year grades.

Hi,
Thanks for the reply. I guess I got a little confused when I was reading through the application requirements. It's good to know that this is only a University of Washington requirement, and not common to all medical schools. Upon looking closely, some of their course requirements are also a little different than usual. They accept either a year of physics or a semester of physics plus a semester of calculus, and their chemistry requirements aren't as specific as a year of chemistry and a year of organic chemistry. I suppose that the added weight on junior year grades would be a good indication of potential success in medical school if most students take their organic chemistry, biology and physics classes that year, in order to have the information fresh in their heads for the MCAT. That's probably what I would have done if I knew all along that I wanted to be a doctor.

Most pre-med students where I went to college took the pre-med requirements in pretty much the same order.

General Chemistry - 1st year of college
Intro to Biology - started 2nd semester of 1st year and finished 1st semester of 2nd year. This way when you are a freshman you are only taking 1 pre-med course at the beginning and it gives you a chance to adjust to college.
Organic Chemistry - 2nd year of college
Physics - not sure when most students take it now - I had AP credit so I didn't need to take physics in college. I'm not sure if medical schools are still willing to accept AP physics credits

Most pre-med students definitely don't wait until junior year to take those classes. It would be very tough to take them all in one year.