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Applying to PA School with a Low GPA: Admissions Directors Answer Your Questions
Tuesday, 22 August, 2017
Applying to PA School with a Low GPA: Admissions Directors Answer Your QuestionsHow to Get Into PA School With a Low GPA PA school administrators from ten top-ranking PA programs answer your questions on how to get into PA school with a low GPA. A low GPA is probably the hardest area to improve. This makes sense – it was years in the making, and can’t be undone without time. It can take about a year in advanced level science courses to bump a high 2.x GPA over 3.0. The lower your GPA, and the more classes you’ve taken, the longer it will take to reflect improvements in your academic record. Here is the part almost nobody says out loud, and it is the reason I still write about this every year. In PAEA's most recent national student report, the class that actually matriculated into PA school had a mean undergraduate GPA of 3.6 and a median of 3.7. Those are the numbers everyone quotes at you. But read one line further down that table: the range ran from 2.2 to 4.0, and the 10th percentile sat at 3.3. (Source: PAEA By the Numbers, Student Report 6, published January 2025, 2022 matriculating class, n = 3,159.) Somebody with a 2.2 got a seat. That is a fact, and I want you to hold onto it on the bad days. I also need you to hold onto the other half of it, because I am not going to lie to you: they were the exception, not the plan. Nine out of ten students who got in walked in with a 3.3 or better. So the honest answer to "can I get into PA school with a low GPA?" is yes — and it is going to cost you more work than it costs the person sitting next to you. Let's talk about exactly what that work is. What is your CASPA calculated GPA? Before you do anything it is important that you have this number in hand. You can view your CASPA GPAs once your application has been Verified. You can read about that here on the CASPA website. And if your application is not verified yet, or you are a year out and just want to know where you stand, do not guess. Your school's GPA and your CASPA GPA are usually not the same number. CASPA recalculates everything: plus and minus grades count, quarter hours get converted to semester hours, and every attempt at a repeated course counts. Retaking a class does not erase the D. It averages with it. So run your real numbers first. I built a free CASPA GPA Calculator that gives you your science, non-science, BCP and overall GPA the exact way CASPA does it — quarter conversion, repeats, +/- grades and all. No signup, no cost, about ten minutes with your transcript in front of you. Do that before you read another word of this post. Every single decision below depends on knowing your real number instead of the one in your head. When I applied to PA school I had a cumulative GPA of 2.9, a result, probably like many of you reading this, of some early misdirection. I got my act together in the second half of my undergraduate career, finishing on the Dean's list with a 3.8 GPA. But my overall GPA did not fully recover and was lower than the 3.0 minimum of the school where I was accepted. Indeed this is not the norm, but you should not let a lower than average GPA stop you from finding a path to PA school if this is truly your passion. Fortunately, you are not alone. Every year PA programs from across the country come together to answer questions posed by aspiring Pre-PA students like yourself. Not surprisingly, questions regarding PA school admissions and low (or lower than average) GPA topped the list. Below are the answers to these questions. PA school GPA requirements: every program’s minimum, next to what its accepted class actually averaged For years this spot held a hand-typed list of “20 programs that accept low GPAs.” It went stale, and worse, some of the numbers in it were flat-out wrong — so I tore it out. What follows is built live from the PA School Finder directory, verified against each program’s own admissions pages, CASPA and the ARC-PA. It rebuilds itself every time this page loads, so it cannot go stale on you again. How to read it: sort by Min cGPA to find the programs whose floor you clear. Then read straight across to Avg accepted cGPA. The distance between those two columns is the honest measure of your climb — and it is where your patient care hours, your upward trend and your essay have to do the heavy lifting. 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