How to Get Into Medical School With a Low GPA
Learn how to maximize your medical school admissions odds and fulfill your dream of becoming a doctor, even if you have a GPA below 3.5
The average GPA for med school matriculants is 3.81, but applicants with lower GPAs can still get accepted.
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Yes, it's possible to get into medical school with a low grade point average (GPA), but your strategy will depend on how low your GPA is and the strength of the rest of your application.
A low undergraduate GPA can be a major roadblock to getting into medical school. However, every year, students with less-than-ideal GPAs make it into the medical field.
There are many reasons you might have a low GPA. Perhaps you experienced a serious illness during your undergrad years. Maybe you didn’t take your grades seriously until the end of college. Perhaps you came to medicine as an upperclassman or after college and weren’t really focusing on science classes beforehand.
Luckily, you can address your less-than-stellar GPA (below 3.5) and minimize its impact on your admissions prospects. Below, we’ll cover how to identify the root cause of your low GPA, strategies to boost your GPA, and how to contextualize it on your application and in your interview.
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What’s considered a low GPA for medical school?
A GPA of 3.5 is considered low for medical school admissions.
The average GPA for med school matriculants is 3.81 for MD-granting programs and 3.60 for DO-granting programs, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). If your GPA is lower than these averages, you’re at a disadvantage.
GPA is relative, and what might be considered a low GPA at one school could be average or strong at another. You’ll want to look at the average GPAs of the schools to which you’re applying.
If, for instance, you have a 3.7 GPA, your grades would be below average for a top school like Stanford or Duke. At the same time, a 3.7 GPA would be average at Tufts or UNC Chapel Hill. For other schools, such as Loyola’s Stritch School of Medicine, a 3.7 would be above average.
Rule of thumb for how good your GPA is for medical school:
Below 3.0 GPA: There is little chance you can make it into med school without boosting your GPA through post-bacc or an SMP. You may have a chance if you’re applying to a DO school with a 516+ on the MCAT, but getting your GPA up is priority number one.
Below 3.5: You’d need an outstanding resume to be competitive, plus a comprehensive explanation for the low GPA.
3.5–3.7: You’d need a strong application to be competitive.
3.7–3.8: You’re competitive at less cut-throat med schools.
3.8–3.9: You’re competitive at most med schools.
3.9–4.0: You’re competitive at top-tier med schools.
While the term “low GPA” is relative, one general rule is that anything below 3.5 is considered low by most, if not all, medical schools. The further one gets from this threshold, the more ground they must make up in other areas of their application.
BCPM GPA
Admissions committees frequently consider your cumulative GPA, your science GPA, and your non-science GPA as separate factors. Your science GPA is more commonly called BCPM—standing for “Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Math.”
Your BCPM GPA is calculated by taking the GPA from your science courses—oftentimes your math courses, too. Applicants’ BCPM is typically slightly lower than their overall GPA.
If you have a cumulative GPA of 3.9, a BCPM GPA of 3.8 is typical and not too problematic. If there’s a huge gap between your cumulative GPA and BCPM GPA, you’ll either need to boost the lower number or include a strong explanation for the disparity in your personal statement.
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Identify the cause of your low GPA
The first thing to consider is what led to your low GPA. This will allow you to assess the most appropriate response and make sense of it for yourself and your application.
Was your GPA caused by illness, mental health problems, or an unavoidable tragedy? In these cases, adding that context may encourage admissions officers to at least give your other application materials a chance.
In any case, write your medical school personal statement about the circumstances surrounding your low GPA. You don’t want to make excuses, but you do need to demonstrate your growth since then through your experiences.
If there’s no “good” reason, and you simply began to take your studies more seriously as you progressed, it would be worth thinking about what led to this change and how you plan to continue this success in medical school. You can bake that sense of progress into your personal statement or secondaries.
One upside in this scenario: Grades that improved over the course of your undergraduate studies will look better than grades that declined. You always want to show an upward trend.
If your low GPA is due to non-science courses, you can humbly point that out in your essays. If it’s the science courses dragging down your GPA, that looks worse to an admissions committee. We recommend boosting your GPA with a post-bacc.
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Strategies to strengthen your med school application
GPA is one of several factors admissions officers consider in their holistic appraisal of your application. How much it matters will depend largely on the school’s review process and your other test scores, essays, and academic accomplishments. There are ways to emphasize other aspects of your application that we’ll get into next.
A GPA below 3.5 will stand out negatively, and admissions officers will expect an explanation. The strategy for applying to medical school with a low GPA should be multi-pronged, as we’ll cover below.
If possible, improve your GPA. If there’s time to make improvements, make them. Below are additional strategies to strengthen your med school application and offset a low GPA.
Consider a post-bacc or SMP
If your GPA is very low, consider spending a year or two taking non-degree or post-bacc courses. The more advanced the courses, the more impressive it will be to admissions officers. Show that you’ve turned things around and that you’re capable of acing rigorous academic work.
Another way to improve your GPA is by enrolling in a Special Master’s Program (SMP). While similar to post-baccalaureate programs, SMPs are generally for those who have already completed their pre-med student requirements.
SMPs are often associated with specific medical schools, potentially giving you a guaranteed interview if you maintain a certain GPA. However, SMPs can be expensive, and the coursework is difficult, making this path “high risk, high reward.”
Get a strong MCAT score
Scoring well on your Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) is important regardless of your GPA. But with a low GPA, the importance of the MCAT increases
A good MCAT score (512+ for MDs, 506+ for DOs) can show admissions officers that while you may have had academic issues in the past, you are now in a good place to take your studies seriously.
Gain more clinical experience
Demonstrating 300+ hours of clinical experience can help in the admissions process. While 150+ hours is generally an unofficial requirement for most med schools, 300-500 hours of high-quality clinical exposure will really stand out and make up for a low GPA.
Clinical experience could include paid positions like medical scribe or phlebotomist, community service at a clinic, volunteer work at a hospital, shadowing a physician with direct patient interaction, or even working as an EMT.
Write a compelling personal statement
This is your chance to really let medical schools know why you’re devoted to medicine and are an excellent fit for that particular medical school—despite what your low GPA might indicate. An outstanding personal statement can certainly make up for an undesirable GPA.
Your personal essay should be unique to you and memorable to adcoms who read it. Demonstrate your maturity, resilience, and growth in the face of below-average grades, rather than simply explaining your GPA.
Obtain strong letters of recommendation
While most of your medical school application will come from you and contain your data, letters of recommendation are a testament from someone other than you that you are well-prepared for the rigors of medical school. A strong recommendation letter can reduce the negative impact of a low GPA.
Strong rec letters can bolster your application, especially those written by people familiar with the core competencies required for medical school, such as science professors. You want letter writers who can attest to your growth and resilience in spite of your GPA.
Acquire research experience
Research hours show that you’ve excelled in an intellectually rigorous pursuit outside your studies. Although many medical schools don’t expect you to have many research hours, 100+ high-quality research hours can help make up for a weaker GPA.
If you have a lot of research experience, be sure to foreground it in your personal and secondary essays. A tangible accomplishment, such as a publication or presenting research at a conference, can have a significant impact on your odds of admission.
Write outstanding secondary essays
You can get a jump start on your secondaries by pre-writing your secondary application responses. Proactively address the reasons for your low GPA, should this come up in any of the essay questions.
Look at questions the school has used in the past, as well as the most common secondary essay questions, and then develop great responses in advance. Doing so will give you plenty of time to draft and polish your essays to perfection.
Consider expanding your school list
You could expand your school list to improve your admissions odds and reduce the negative impact of your below-average GPA. Include schools you may not find as “prestigious” but are more likely to accept a holistically strong application with a weak GPA.
Look at the average GPAs of admitted students at the schools you are considering and make a realistic school list that fits your statistics. That may mean considering DO schools, which generally accept applicants with lower GPAs or MCAT scores.
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Explaining your low GPA to adcoms
Once you’ve done all you can to improve the other aspects of the application, you’ll want to focus on “explaining” your low GPA.
This can be tricky, as you should never sound defensive or flippant while writing about bad grades. Your goal is to demonstrate to medical school admissions committees who you were in the past, how you’ve grown, and that you will excel academically in the future.
You’ll have to strike a balance between straightforward explanation and taking responsibility. Below, we’ll go over how to address your low GPA in different essays, LORs, and your med school interview.
In the personal statement
The most common place to address your low GPA is the personal statement. Devote a paragraph to recognizing your weak GPA, giving it context, and demonstrating how you’ve grown since those low grades.
Basically, use your personal essay as an opportunity to turn your below average GPA from a weakness into a strength. You just need to (honestly) reframe the shortcoming as an instance where you grew as a student, an individual, and a future physician—a formative experience that other applicants may not have gone through.
In the adversity essay
There are multiple secondaries where you could address a low GPA, but possibly the strongest secondary essay in which to talk about your GPA struggles is the adversity essay.
This common secondary essay provides an opportunity to discuss the circumstances that led to your low GPA. If you can present a narrative showing that you’ve overcome adversity and found a way to excel in the time since, you will have turned a weakness into a strength.
Adversity can involve being in an underserved population and overcoming the struggles that come with that experience. But there are many forms of adversity, including personal health, difficult family circumstances, or economic hardship.
In recommendation letters
Letters of recommendation are a great opportunity for someone besides you to demonstrate how you’ve grown since you got some bad grades. The trouble here is that you cannot instruct letter writers on what to include.
Of course, you can give them your stats strategically. It’s normal to provide recommendation letter writers with your GPA, MCAT, transcript, accomplishments, and suggestions for what they could cover.
Do not cross that clear ethical line and lie or write the letter for them. But you can certainly select a letter writer you trust and give them the data they need to craft a good letter.
Make sure you get strong letters of recommendation from faculty who know your story and can write with confidence about your ability to perform at a high academic level. Someone who saw you improve is an ideal recommender to round out your narrative.
During interviews
When you go into a medical school interview with a GPA below 3.5, anticipate a question about your low grades. With proper preparation, you can turn your weakness into an asset through confidence, honesty, and humility.
For instance, if a major health or mental health issue led you to have bad grades for the first two years of college, it’s likely that you grew personally from that challenge. Be comfortable talking about your growth.
Take responsibility for your actions, and explain what you could or could not have avoided. If, for example, you started out in the wrong major or you took advanced classes for which you were underprepared, you should acknowledge why these decisions weren’t the best and show how you’ve matured since you made them.
If you spent your college career playing a serious varsity sport and neglecting your grades, consider rehearsing an interview answer about what that sport taught you, and how it led you to the route you’re now taking to medical school.
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Frequently asked questions
Which medical schools are more accepting of applicants with lower GPAs?
Osteopathic medical schools (DO-granting programs) are more accepting of applicants with lower GPAs.
Also, several allopathic med schools (MD-granting programs) use a holistic admissions process in an effort to reduce the significance of GPA and increase the weight of other factors. Such med schools include Meharry Medical College, Howard University College of Medicine, and Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine.
Is 3.7 a good GPA for med school?
A GPA of 3.7 is pretty good for DO med schools and slightly below average for MD med schools. The average GPA for DO matriculants is 3.60, and the average GPA for MD matriculants is 3.81.
Should I consider applying to DO schools instead of MD?
You can certainly consider applying to osteopathic DO schools through AACOMAS instead of allopathic MD schools through AMCAS. Both types of programs allow you to earn a medical degree and become a doctor.
It is slightly harder to get into MD-granting programs, and MDs tend to make more money on average after residency. Otherwise, the outcomes are generally the same.
Typically, DO physicians are more interested in holistic or preventive medicine, osteopathic manipulative treatment, and primary care specialties like Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, and Family Medicine.
Final thoughts
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to addressing a low GPA on a medical school application. Your circumstances are unique, and your strategy should depend on the medical school you hope to attend.
If you have a GPA below 3.5, take serious measures outlined above to mitigate that. Research easier med schools to get into, and consider a gap year to boost your application.
If your GPA is better than 3.5 but still not where you’d like it to be, you can still use the above strategies to sway admissions officers while also preparing yourself for success in medical school. Be realistic about where you’re competitive, and make the best of your situation.
Still looking for personalized advice on your unique situation? Our advisors are ready to help applicants just like you stand out in the dog-eat-dog med school admissions landscape.
About the Author
Dr. Shirag Shemmassian is the Founder of Shemmassian Academic Consulting and one of the world's foremost experts on medical school admissions. For over 20 years, he and his team have helped thousands of students get into medical school using his exclusive approach.
