How important is Psychology GPA?

[La Cosmopolitan]

I found out today that my psychology GPA is a 3.0. I know this is pretty mediocre. Will this significantly hurt me in admissions to Clinical programs? 

[Clinapp2017]

58 minutes ago, La Cosmopolitan said:

I found out today that my psychology GPA is a 3.0. I know this is pretty mediocre. Will this significantly hurt me in admissions to Clinical programs? 

Mean/median psych GPA generally falls above a 3.5. For most APA-approved programs, their website will have somewhere we you can find stats of successfully admitted applicants over the past few years. What is your overall GPA? 

 

The best ways to compensate for a low GPA if you are applying this cycle with that GPA would be: (1) have posters and ideally a publication in a peer-review journal, (2) have a stellar GRE score for schools that care about it, (3) take the Psych GRE if possible and score very well. 

 

If you don't have posters/pubs and a good GRE/psych GRE, you may want to consider applying a different cycle. You *could* get in this cycle, but it's important to be honest that you are competing with a very strong pool of applicants for a handful of slots (funded programs anyways). You could always consider applying for research assistant jobs and/or getting a master's degree in psych (more expensive, but could fix the GPA problem if your master's degree GPA is excellent). 

[La Cosmopolitan]

Thanks @Clinapp2017! Overall GPA is a 3.35. I have two years of post-bac research experience and several publications. I also scored 90th percentile for verbal and 70th for quantitative.

[Clinapp2017]

On 9/1/2020 at 10:25 PM, La Cosmopolitan said:

Thanks @Clinapp2017! Overall GPA is a 3.35. I have two years of post-bac research experience and several publications. I also scored 90th percentile for verbal and 70th for quantitative.

That's great -- I think the pubs will make up for it.