Increasing Your GPA by Taking 5 Units of Letter Graded Research Every Quarter

[Li-S]

Do PhD Chemistry Programs (but I guess other graduate and professional schools also) get suspicious when you try to increase your GPA by taking 5 units of research letter graded units every term? Most professors are nice to their undergraduate researchers so they just give them 5 units of A's even if all they do is grunt work like cleaning beakers and stuff. So I think that is unfair especially if you go to a school that gives Pass / No Pass units for undergraduate research.

[Usmivka]

Many schools have research as only pass/fail credit. However, if you do A quality work for research, it seems like you should get credit for it if the school allows. Your ability to do high quality research is, after all, the most important consideration for a graduate program. But what your research adviser has to say in a letter of reccomendation will count for much more anyway. I don't see that anyone is getting an unfair advantage in this sense. GPA is a fairly minor consideration for admission once you are past threshold grades. If someone really needs "easy A's" to prop up his/her grade beyond whatever this minimum cutoff is, grad school may not be the best choice.

[TakeruK]

I had both types of research courses -- for my co-op education work courses (which didn't have to be research, but they were), we just had pass/fail, based on completing all the reports as required by the program. But for my senior/honours thesis, we were given a grade like any other, but it wasn't just given by our advisor. A large chunk of the grade was given by our peers and the thesis coordinator (we gave 3 presentations to the other thesis students: proposal, midterm report, final defense) and the thesis itself was graded by our advisor and a second reader in the department. There were also participation marks for attending the talks and participating -- filling in comment forms with helpful comments and asking questions. So getting marks for research isn't always "free".

However, I think that universities don't just look at the cumulative/major GPA and base it on that -- that's probably a good cutoff criteria if necessary, but they're going to look at your actual transcript too. They will then weigh your courses based on what they are looking for, and they will probably get rid of research courses and other unrelated electives, or if you happen to take a random 200 level course related to your major (but not required) in 4th year because you wanted/needed an extra credit.

I know they go further than just GPA because at some schools, for applications, they don't even want me to enter a GPA, they rather calculate it themselves with their weighting. (Although as an International student, the grades may be hard to translate to US equivalencies so that might be why they rather do it themselves.)