Just one look at the medical school application process and it becomes clear that one of the foundations of any person’s application is their marks. No matter which school you apply to in any country, marks will always be needed? And why is that. Well simply as a means of quantitative comparison.  Beside the MCAT, using marks is the only other way of systematically screening applicants.  A computer cannot tell the difference between an Olympic athlete and a person with a Nature publication, but it sure can tell the difference between a 4.0 and a 3.7 GPA.  But one person may ask, why have marks if the school already requires the MCAT.  Well simply put, the MCAT only describes a person’s ability in one point in time.  If I took the MCAT last summer, that describes my ability, compared to others who took the same test, in that one summer.  Maybe two years ago I was a big slacker and had I done the MCAT two years ago maybe I would not have scored as high.  But medical schools don’t want someone who can only do well once, or sometimes, but someone who can consistently do well.  That is where marks come into play because marks allow the schools to see how well you have been doing over a period of years, instead of a period of one summer.

Thus it is important to maintain good grades each year and not just the year before you apply.  Many schools consider all your undergraduate grades, while others just consider your most recent years, or your best two years.  If you are in first year of your undergraduate studies, I highly recommend that you start maintaining good marks and to not slack off in this department. The reason being that once you get a year or two of bad marks, that severely hinders the number of schools that you can apply to.  The fact of the matter is, most schools consider your cumulative GPA and so, having low marks can hinder that GPA.  From my experience, the one thing that consistently stops someone from applying to medicine are marks.  To put it bluntly, while it is true that good marks do not guarantee entry into medical school, bad marks guarantee that you won’t.

So now that we have established the importance of marks, let’s start discussing ways to optimize them.

The first piece of advice I have is “Know thy enemy”, in this case, know the grading system of your University, and understand how medical schools interpret the grades from your university.  For example, York University uses the letter grade system, with a converted GPA on a 9.0 scale.  What this means is, on my transcript I got letter grades such as A+ or A for each course, but to calculate my GPA for my degree requirements, each letter was converted to a number on a 9 scale.  Now that I understand my own university’s GPA system, I must now look at how medical schools convert that GPA into their own GPA (usually on a 4.0 scale).

Let’s use Ontario medical schools as an example. Fortunately, all Ontario schools adhere to the OMSAS Grade Conversion Table (http://www.ouac.on.ca/omsas/pdf/c_omsas_b.pdf).  When looking at this table I find that they convert York University grades to the 4.0 scale in the following fashion: A+ = 4.0 and A=3.8, but B+ = 3.3 and B = 3.0!!!! Wait, what happened?  If you look carefully, you will notice that the drop from A+ to A is a drop of 0.2 GPA, but a drop from A to a B+ is a drop of 0.5!! This means that medical school grade conversion of your GPA is not linear! So do not automatically assume that oh, if I get a B+ instead of an A I lose the same amount on my GPA as if I scored an A instead of an A+ because that is not true at all!

What this now means is that we can easily set a lower limit for all my grades.  As a York University student, I should aim to never score lower than an A, because scoring a B+ or lower severely lowers your GPA. In fact it takes 2.5 A+ scores, of the same weight, to raise a B+ to an A, and heck, that is a lot of A+’s that you are wasting on raising up a B+.

So what things can you do to optimize your marks? Well this may seem intuitive, but choose your courses wisely.  First off, choose courses that you are interested in, because as we all know, it is easier to work hard on something that you are passionate about instead of something that is a bore. Secondly, choose courses with marking schemes that work to your advantage.  This point is key, because if you blindly choose courses that you are just “interested in” then that may not be enough.  There is a huge difference between courses that only have multiple choice tests and exams, and a course with projects, assignments, essays, etc. Some things take more time than others, and you have to play to your strengths.  Think about which courses will allow you to do the best while spending the least amount of time on them.  Even for mandatory courses, more than one professor may be teaching it, and thus, they may structure the course differently.  One professor may have lots of short and long answer questions, while the other may have many multiple choice questions. One professor may have lots of little tests and quizzes, while another professor may have just a couple of big exams.  If the course mark breakdown is not available before you choose your courses, then just ask.  E-mail your professor, tell him/her that you are interested in taking their course, but you want to know the topics covered, mark breakdown, etc. to make an informed decision.  Most professors who care about students would willingly send this information out.  Professors who don’t because they are too anal may not be the best professors anyways.

Personally, I have that choosing courses which do not have assignments or projects, but simply tests usually saves me time and anguish.  With assignments I tend to spend too much time on them which later messes me up for tests, and with projects, especially group projects, there is just too much work for the mark you get out of it.  For tests, you study as much as you can and then take the test and finish in a matter of hours. For types of tests, I tend to lean towards multiple choice tests since it is guaranteed that the right answer is on the page in front of you.

Lastly, the biggest help for any course is probably past tests and exams, however these are often hard to come by.  Sometimes student groups such as the Biology Society or the Chemistry Society at your university may sell past tests/exams.  However if they don’t, your best bet would be to track down an older student who has previously taken the course and get it from them.  Past tests/exams are useful because it gives you an insight into the style, difficulty, and number of questions on the test.  What’s more, professors often get lazy and repeat similar or the same questions so it would be in your best interest to practice doing questions on these past tests and make sure you understand how to do each one.