(Grad)GPA woes

It’s funny. When I was at the end of my undergrad career, everyone told me how once you get to graduate school, what really matters is the work you produce and the ways you contribute, and not so much your grade point average. By grad school, they told me, it’s your thesis that really matters, not the number on the transcript. I think I even recall hearing, during my program orientation, that we weren’t supposed to be so obsessed with our GPA as focused on contributing and just doing quality work.

I had been geared toward the latter, until a week or so ago a fellow student told me that she’d heard just the opposite in her undergrad, that you need to have a near-perfect GPA in order to get into a doctoral program. She said, basically, that while “it’s okay to have a few A-’s”, if you have too many, or many grades below an A-, grad schools don’t really want you. It’s amazing how different the schools of thought can be.

So now, as a result of our conversation, I suppose you could say I’ve become obsessed with grades. During my undergraduate career, I think I got one perfect A - the rest of my grades over the last four years were B+’s and A-’s, with maybe a B and a C- scattered here and there. Don’t get me wrong - I knew my GPA wasn’t that hot, and I was amazed when I was accepted into my first-choice program - but I always thought that those few A-’s I got were really stellar. Now, I think I have the equivalent of an A- in all of my courses, and I’m on the verge of panic. Will Rutgers or Brown or Yale really reject me just because I don’t have a 3.99? And, even if they won’t, how on earth will I find time to study to re-take the GRE exam, which I scored so abysmally on that I can’t even say my score publicly?