PA school curriculum

[Eman1]

Hello everyone, I was wondering about how many credits you need to graduate from a PA school? I saw that one of my program requires you to complete 90 credits in 2 years. That means you would need to take 22.5 credits per semester. If we are talking about 3-4 credit classes, it sounds like an absolute hell!  Is it as bad as it seems or am I missing something? That is like a 4 year degree in 2 years!

[JD2012]

9 minutes ago, Eman1 said:

Hello everyone, I was wondering about how many credits you need to graduate from a PA school? I saw that one of my program requires you to complete 90 credits in 2 years. That means you would need to take 22.5 credits per semester. If we are talking about 3-4 credit classes, it sounds like an absolute hell!  Is it as bad as it seems or am I missing something? That is like a 4 year degree in 2 years!

Yes especially the didactic year. For me PA school made my undergrad experience look like Kindergarten.  It's intense but doable if you have your priorities in line. 

[wamucc]

Yup, it's that bad   It's basically the four years of med school in 2ish years. The good news is, it ends eventually!

[Eman1]

17 hours ago, wamucc said:

Yup, it's that bad   It's basically the four years of med school in 2ish years. The good news is, it ends eventually!

I have heard Med school was roughly 45 credits a year, so it is just as bad and longer. I get what you mean though. You see, I am a 3.0 student and having to make important decisions here.

[EMEDPA]

Often people describe it as 2/3rds of medschool in half the time. Pretty accurate. 

[Eman1]

9 hours ago, EMEDPA said:

Often people describe it as 2/3rds of medschool in half the time. Pretty accurate. 

My cGPA and sGPA are both 3.0, should I still apply? 

[Apollo1]

Some classes are 2-3 credits, some classes are 5-6 credits. It's intense, but not impossible.

If you're concerned about credit load as a potential PA student, you should probably reevaluate why you want to become a PA.

[UGoLong]

Number of credits don't really tell the whole story.

Tuition is often based on a college's cost-per-credit hour taken. Schools generally want their tuition costs to be competitive so assigning credit hours to classes is an area where a PA program may have some flexibility. But programs still have to meet the same national standards set by ARC-PA so two different programs may assign different numbers of credits for a given class and still "spend" about the same amount of wall clock time on the material.

I would set aside your undergraduate experience with credit hours. Hundreds of thousands of PA students have gotten through. It's like an intense but doable job.

On the plus side, the same program is teaching all of your classes so they try to space out exams a bit, unlike in undergrad where your professors didn't coordinate with each other. I'll never forget having five finals in three days as an undergrad, including three on the same day! Never saw that in PA school.

Edited July 1, 2020 by UGoLong

[kyoung1]

UGoLong is right.  The number of credits doesn't tell the whole story.  I recently set up a PA program and decided to give the appropriate number of credit-hours for the time that was spent both in and out of class (Carnegie units).  It ended up being 122 credit-hours for the program.  Which is a lot, but it isn't any more time in the classroom than many other programs.  There are many regulatory agencies that influence how credit-hours are awarded (state education dept & accreditation agencies).  If you spend the time, you should get credit for what you do.  This didn't change the cost of the program, but it did allow for a better faculty:student ratio which is also important.  So in answer to the OP's original question.  There is no set number of credits to graduate from PA school.  You just need to do the program as it is set up and then graduate.  My advice would be to look at the whole program curriculum/cost/rotations to see what best fits your needs.

Edited July 2, 2020 by kyoung1

[Eman1]

10 hours ago, kyoung1 said:

UGoLong is right.  The number of credits don't tell the whole story.  I recently set up a PA program and decided to give the appropriate number of credit-hours for the time that was spent both in and out of class (Carnegie units).  It ended up being 122 credit-hours for the program.  Which is a lot, but it isn't any more time in the classroom than many other programs.  There are many regulatory agencies that influence how credit-hours are awarded (state education dept & accreditation agencies).  If you spend the time, you should get credit for what you do.  This didn't change the cost of the program, but it did allow for a better faculty:student ratio which is also important.  So in answer to the OP's original question.  There is no set number of credits to graduate from PA school.  You just need to do the program as it is set up and then graduate.  My advice would be to look at the whole program curriculum/cost/rotations to see what best fits your needs.

I just saw that one of the programs I am looking at is a 90 credit program over two years, that is why i was a little concerned. on the plus side, we don't get summer breaks. That means the credits will be spaced out to an extent.

[SHU-CH]

Like others have said above, credits mean different things to different institutions. If you want to get a realistic sense of the workload, your best bet is to get a copy of the weekly course schedule for each semester and see how many hours are spent in each class. Big credit courses are often things like physical exam lab which require a lot of hands-on practice, but are perhaps a little less demanding in terms of material compared to something like pharm or physio.