Thanks for demonstrating that to me. A GPA of 8.57 is really high in my books. With that GPA calculator I was playing around with, if there was just one paper that was below an A, then the GPA goes down a lot. Interesting to think that GPA hangs in balance of a couple of papers, people must get really hung up on it.
May I ask what your friend is doing know with that GPA -was he accepted into another profesh program?
Also, if it is not too personal, may I ask what your GPA was to be accepted into med?
Urm, I have seen this a lot over these pages and i was wondering if someone would be so kind as to inform me what a percentile is and what it means?
I also have seen other peoples scores over the forums, and I think that Amygdala had a score of 200 something, what does this mean? I dont get all the percentages and stuff?!!??! Is each section out of 100 points? Obviously 168 raw total is too low for med, so what would be the threshold for the profesh programes like med etc??
thanks
Yeah that's the thing with GPA. A change in grade has a big impact on the GPA. Not only that, because GPA is worth 66% of your mark for med, the effect is even more pronounced, and it's probably why my friend's GPA of 8.57 wasn't good enough.
Most people got hung up more about paper marks. It just seemed too silly for the university to use grades rather than percentages for something as important as entrance into medicine, but it looks like they really use your GPA. I was kind of in denial because all that effort to get a good A+ instead of just a low A+ didn't help my chances at all and I didn't want to accept that xD In the eyes of the GPA system a 90% A+ and a 100% A+ are no different (though they are significantly different in terms of the amount of effort you have to put in), and a 85% A and 89% A are no different and so on.
He was invited for a dentistry interview, but I don't think he got into dent either (he didn't take the interview too seriously because he was going for med). Got an interview for physio too but decided not to go to that. Now he's doing a BSc in neuroscience and I assume going for graduate entry, which was exactly my plan B too.
I had a GPA of 9 and so did Arutha plus you can expect maybe...50 students who have a GPA of 9 in HSFY (I wonder if HEAL was scaled up, cause in the mid semester test only like 23 people got A+ in it hum). I had the same UMAT score as my friend, 168 raw, (Arutha had some crazy high score lol) so it is enough if you have a 9 GPA (at least last year it was, to answer your third question). Taking the 45/45/10 weighting into consideration that Arutha explained, my UMAT score was still really similar to my friends. It's just the difference between 9 GPA and 8.57 GPA that decided if we got in or not.
8.57 would probably be good enough with a UMAT above 90 percentile and definitely good enough with Arutha's UMAT I think 98 percentile if I remember correctly. Of course you wouldn't aim for 8.57...you'd aim for 9
There is no actual cutoff for the UMAT for med, but of course if you got a really terrible UMAT then even a 9 GPA couldn't compensate for that (and the other way around too, with a terrible GPA)
A thing to note about percentiles is that they compare you to the whole UMAT cohort i.e. everyone in NZ and Aus who are in last year of high school or in uni. But the Otago cohort is a pretty specialised cohort that isn't representative of the UMAT cohort, so if you took my 80 percentile as an example, I couldn't say that I did better than 80% of the people at Otago, I could only say that I did better than 80% of everyone who did UMAT. In my experience Otago has an overrepresentation of people with high UMAT scores, so an 80 percentile is actually pretty poor when compared to the Otago cohort.
So to put yourself in a good position for med, you'd want a 9 GPA, and then a UMAT at the 90th percentile or higher, which is a raw total of about 180 (getting 60 in each section).
Maybe we'll get to find something out about marks even though they don't release cutoff scores (how lame of them 
).