Current physical therapy students are always reaching out asking, “Do you need to get good grades in PT school?”
While it is great to have top grades, it isn’t actually that important – unless you’re planning on applying to a residency or PhD program in the future. The most important part of PT school is actually learning and gaining experience in the clinic.
You can learn a lot and be an amazing future-physical therapist without getting 100 on every (or any) test. Most tests in most physical therapy programs are multiple-choice in order to prepare students to take the boards. And while choosing between A, B, C or D is great prep for the NPTE, it has almost zero correlation to what it is like to actually work as a physical therapist. You can learn all the right information and be ready to apply it in the real world, but get tripped up by a tricky multiple-choice question. My professors in PT school constantly told me in my first year of graduate school how good I was at choosing the second-best answer on tests. They could tell I understood the material and I was able to explain my thinking correctly, but unfortunately this led to more B’s than I ever wanted to see.
More important than my test grades, were my stellar performances on practicals and my rave reviews during clinical experiences. These are what made me feel prepared to actually work as a PT.
Not to mention there is little practical use for good grades in the real world. My employers have never asked about them, and it would be ridiculous to bring them up in conversation with a patient. It’s not like you walk into the room to introduce yourself by saying, “By the way, I got all A’s in physical therapy school!” Instead, your patients will judge you based on your bedside manner, knowledge, confidence, and a host of other characteristics. They care about the results they’re getting, not the grade you earned in neuroanatomy several years ago.
There are a few caveats to this attitude, however. It is important to get great grades in high school and as an undergraduate so that you can get into college and eventually PT school. It is also crucial to keep your grades in the passing range during PT school. In my program, as in many others, the cutoff was 70, and several people failed out for falling beneath this floor in even one class. So, while it doesn’t matter if you get all A’s, you can’t scrape by with C’s either. Additionally, you should check to see how your GPA potentially affects your tuition or certain scholarships. By keeping my grades above a certain level, I saved a few thousand dollars each semester by earning a merit scholarship.
But beyond these exceptions, stressing about grades is missing the point. PT school is about learning new things and building relationships, not torturing yourself in the library to get an A+. Instead, make sure you’re learning and retaining the information in a way that you’ll be able to apply it in the future. Your future physical therapist self will thank you!