Do grad school admissions care about course load? Do grad school admissions (particularly for Arts) care about how many classes you've taken per semester during your senior years?
For example, I'm (potentially) finishing my undergraduate studies with a 3-class semester. However, during this time I'll also be volunteering in classrooms for experience (I want to do a BEd before a Master's, the latter is far down the line) and potentially working part-time. I've taken 4 to 5 courses for all my other semesters save for one other, when I was also working and doing job searching for my school's Co-op program.
I'm worried, potentially, that a 3-class load will reflect poorly - even though I did a lot of other things during this time. However, my GPA is very high, above what is considered the competitive average to be accepted.
In your experiences how do grad schools weigh overall GPA vs overall class loads?
&quot;In your experiences how do grad schools weigh overall GPA vs overall
class loads?&quot;


GPA is much more important.
Course load is often not even seen, unless people dig into your transcript to more details such as which courses you took and which ones brought up/down your GPA: In this case if you took only 3 courses/term throughout your undergrad, it might raise eyebrows but you are saying it's only your senior year so it won't likely be a problem.
More important than GPA and Course Load combined, is reference letters and publication/research-experience if you have any. GPA means very little to me because I know that a 70% at Oxford (where I did my PhD) is considered a &quot;1st&quot; which is the highest-level of honour and is only awarded to the best of the best students, yet in Canada (where I did my undergrad degrees) it was common to get 90s or even 100% occasionally. Furthermore even within Canada a 90% at University of Waterloo might mean something different from a 90% at Laurier Unviersity (in the same city), and a 90% in Psychology might mean something different from a 90% in Literature (even at the same university), and a 90% in PSYCH 101 with a leniently grading TA might mean something different from a 90% with a harshly grading TA (even for the same course in the same university in the same country!). Your volunteering and experience-gaining, which you say is the reason why you're taking 3 courses instead of 5, might actually be benefiting you more than you imagine, because if you do well you might get a strong reference letter, which is usually more powerful than a good GPA alone.