From Tara Kuther, Ph.D.,
Your Guide to Graduate School.
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Your GPA or grade point average is important to admissions committees, not because it signifies your intelligence, but instead because it is a long-term indicator how well you perform your job as student. Grades reflect your motivation and your ability to do consistently good or bad work. Generally, most master's programs require minimum GPAs of 3.0 or 3.3, and most Ph.D. programs require minimum GPAs of 3.3 or 3.5.

Not all grades are the same, though. Admissions committees study the courses taken: a B in Advanced Statistics is worth more than an A in Introduction to Pottery. In other words, they consider the context of the GPA: where was it obtained and of what courses is it comprised? In many cases, it's better to have a lower GPA composed of solid challenging courses than a high GPA based on easy courses like "Basket Weaving for Beginners" and the like. Frequently admissions committees will examine your overall GPA as well as the GPA for the courses relevant to the programs to which you're applying (e.g., GPA in science and math courses for applicants to medical school and graduate programs in the sciences). Ensure that you're taking the right courses for the graduate program to which you plan to apply.

Admissions committees also understand that applicants' grade point averages often can't be meaningfully compared. Grades can differ among universities - an A at one university may be a B+ at another. Also grades differ among professors in the same university. Because grade point averages are not standardized, it's hard to compare applicants' GPAs. Therefore admissions committees turn to standardized exams, like the GRE, MCAT, LSAT, and GMAT, to make comparisons among applicants from different universities. Therefore if you have a low GPA, it is essential that you try your best on these tests.