I am trying to get an estimate of what my cumulative GPA will be after I take my premed courses.
My school is on the quarter system, and I will have taken about 8 classes total, each one 4 credit hours.
Then I may go ahead and take 5 additional courses elsewhere, but on a semester system.
Does anyone know the equation to calculate my new GPA? Let’s say my old GPA (cumulative) was a 2.0, for 120 hours total.
In Sum: Will it be pssible to raise my lousy 2.0 GPA to a 3.0 at least, after taking over 10 classes and getting all A’s and B’s?
claudette737-
Raising your 2.0 to at least a 3.0 may be a tough task with only 10 classes. I started back to school with a 2.3 gpa after 50 hrs. I was able to raise my gpa a full point to a 3.3, but it took about 100 hrs of mostly A’s, a few B’s, and one C. It will be tough to do, so strive hard for an A in each class.
Hi there,
You can do your own calculation by inserting As and the number of credit hour and taking an average. It is going to take quite a bit of work to offset a 2.0 especially 120 hours of coursework. You may want to look into another strategy such as graduate work after your pre-med stuff. If you had only four hours of 2.0 and 4 hours of 4.0, you still end up with a cumulatative of 3.0. It really depends on how many hours you have to offset and you have quite a few hours. If you have more than 10 hours below 2.0, you are not going to move that cumulative GPA much even with 10 hours of A.
Now you will get some credit for doing well in your later coursework but you still are going to have to get your cumulative GPA above 3.0 for almost every medical school. You are probably looking at taking more hours and doing very, very well. You may want to do a search and look at the number of hours that Old Man Dave had to offset his 1.91 cumulative GPA. It was considerably more than 10 hours.
Good luck!
Natalie 
Hi Natalie,
Is it really necessary to get the overall cum gpa above a 3.0? From what I’ve read here and there, the later courses (post-bacc) grades are what really count. I currently have a 2.47, and with 8 classes of pre-reqs I could probably get that to a 2.6, assuming all A’s in those classes.
This is the post I saw from OMD:
http://www.oldpremeds.org/fusionbb/showpost.php?post/8419/
Quote:
Like you Tae, I had awful grades to combat…actually, even worse than yours! When I applied, neither AACOMAs nor AMCAS allowed you to substitute grades. I was battling a 15 year-old 1.2 cumGPA over 93 hours when I went back to college. Even though I did an entire BS, soup to nuts, and graduated magna cum laude with a 3.85…my net GPA was ~2.6 / sciGPA ~2.9 for both AACOMAS & AMCAS.
Hi there,
In today’s climate with applications to medical schools up, you really need to have your GPA above 3.0. If not, you are facing an uphill battle. Dave applied and was accepted in a different year. So far, applications have been trending up and the competition is pretty still. Applications among non-traditional students are through the roof. If an AdCom has a choice between a student with a 2.9 and a student with a 3.3, the 3.3 is going to be the one invited for the interview. Also, many places use your cum GPA and MCAT as the sole means of determining if you are going to be invited for an interview. The DO schools may be different but the allopathic schools are pretty unforgiving on this one.
If you are in a post-bacc program with a link in, you may be able to get around the older poor GPA but I can tell you that the schools that I applied to, used total GPA and everything counted. Call some schools and find out what the scoop is before you start shelling out the money to apply. I can’t emphasize more, that the competition is very, very difficult out there and that schools are seeing a pretty good number of non-trads with good GPAs and MCATs. When I applied back in 1997, I was a totally anomaly. Today, that just isn’t the case and I would face an uphill battle with my cum GPA over 3.6 and MCATs above 35. Make sure that you have all of the info. You cannot afford to invest time and money without all of the information. For example, Howard’s average GPA for the class entering last year was 3.3 and MCAT was 29. That is considerably higher that the year that I entered when the average GPA was 2.9 and MCAT was 26. That’s Howard, a pretty low-ranked allopathic school! Be sure that you are correct. UVA, an average state school, had average GPAs of 3.6 and MCATs of 34. There are intangibles other than GPA and MCAT scores that can get you in but you have to have as much info as possible and you have to be as competitive as possible. If not, look into a formal post bacc with a tie-in program and be ready to perform well.
Natalie
Thanks for the info Natalie!
Guess I’m going to have to re-think my strategy 
There is some interesting stuff with Fresh Start programs I need to look into. Otherwise, completing an entire BS degree may be the only option for people like me with low GPAs.
Natalie,
You said to calculate the GPA, “insert A’s and take the average.” So for example, let’say I take 18 classes total and get all B’s (3.0). That of course averages to 3.0. So my cumulative GPA is the average of the old (2.0) and the new (3.0), which is 2.5. Is it that simple? I had come up with a more complicated formula. Do you think 18 classes is enough to offset a 2.0? I don’t wanto to do an entire degree again…
No, it’s each grade times the number of credit hours the course was for. Add all those up, and divide by the total number of credits. So, for your existing bachelor’s, to make life simpler you can multiply your gpa by the number of credits in the degree. Now you have a gpa*hours figure. AS you go along, you add each course (3.0 B * 3 credit hours = 9) to that whopping big number, and any time you want your GPA, you take your whopping big number and divide by the total number of credit hours represented there (your original bachelor’s plus the course work since then).
This is why it takes so long to overcome a whole degree’s worth of low GPA. Each new course has only a little weight when trying to raise your average.
Denise
Quote:
Natalie,
You said to calculate the GPA, “insert A’s and take the average.” So for example, let’say I take 18 classes total and get all B’s (3.0). That of course averages to 3.0. So my cumulative GPA is the average of the old (2.0) and the new (3.0), which is 2.5. Is it that simple? I had come up with a more complicated formula. Do you think 18 classes is enough to offset a 2.0? I don’t wanto to do an entire degree again…
Hi there,
Since you have 90 credit hours with an overall GPA of 2.0, my point was that even 10 hours of 4.0 isn’t going to raise your GPA by very much. If you look at Dave’s experience in getting a totally new bachelor’s degree, he still was not able to raise his GPA above 3.0 even with a nearly 4.0 in every class in his new degree. Dave also applied to and was accepted by an excellent DO school that looked very favorably upon his new academic record. The allopathic schools are less willing to do this, even the low-ranked ones.
When you have this much damage control to do, you need to look at a post bacc with linkage or a graduate degree in a science with some significant research. Even with a totally new degree, you have an uphill battle trying to offset a 2.0. You might be better served in a program like Fresh Start, where your older GPA is not counted or as I stated above, a post bacc with a direct link.
Someone above stated the formula correctly. You can’t offset 90 hours of 2.0 with even 18 hours of 4.0.
Natalie
Denise, you posted above on how to do the calculation.
I may have mis-spoken when I said I have 141.5 credit hours. My transcript says I have 141.5 SEMESTER HOURS. So, doesn’t that mean I ACTUALLY HAVE 47.16
CREDITS? (141.5 divided by 3).Based on that, I followed Denises’ advice and came up with the following figures:
“Multiply your gpa by the number of credits in the degree”:
(So I did: 2.0 * 47.16= 94.32)
“AS you go along, you add each course (3.0 B * 3 credit hours = 9) to that whopping big number”
(So I did: 94.32 + 9=103.32)
"and any time you want your GPA, you take your whopping big number and divide by the total number of credit hours represented there (your original bachelor’s plus the course work since then)."
So I did: 94.32 + 9/{47.16 + 3}. Based on these calculations, my new GPA after taking one 3-credit hour class and earning a ‘B’ is: 2.05. Did I read Denises’s advice correctly? Please help, before I waste my money pursuing an uphill battle.Thank you all.
141.5 is probably how many credit hours you have, if you had an existing batchelor’s degree. A bachelor’s degree is usually over 120 hours.
So I calculated that if, say, you take 2 3-hour courses and get A’s, your GPA would rise to 2.08. Yes, it’s an uphill battle. All I can suggest is get all the A’s you can, consider osteopathic schools, which might give your application courses a second look at a lower gpa, and make sure the rest of your application shines like a jewel.
It’s daunting, and only you can decide if it’s worth it.