You can have the GPA.

The patient care experience.

The PA shadowing.

The volunteering.

The prerequisite courses.

…and STILL weaken an otherwise competitive PA school application with completely preventable CASPA mistakes.

And here’s the frustrating part:

Some of these mistakes have absolutely nothing to do with whether you’d make an incredible PA.

PA programs may review hundreds—or even thousands—of applications during an admissions cycle. When admissions committees are trying to decide who moves forward to an interview, you don’t want inconsistencies, questionable information, or sloppy mistakes giving them a reason to hesitate.

As PAs who have served on PA school admissions committees, we’ve reviewed applications from the other side of the table.

Here are 10 CASPA red flags you should look for before you hit submit.

1. Your Experience Hours Look Inflated

This is a BIG one.

You want every hour of patient care, healthcare, volunteering, leadership, research, and shadowing you’ve earned represented on your application.

But those numbers also need to make sense.

If you report working 40 hours per week at one job while simultaneously reporting another experience at 30 hours per week, taking a full course load, volunteering weekly, and shadowing several hours a week, an admissions reviewer may start doing some mental math.

That doesn’t automatically mean you’ve done anything wrong. Some applicants really do have insane schedules.

But your timeline should be accurate and believable.

Don’t round 1,742 hours up to 2,000 because it looks better.

Don’t count the same hours twice.

And don’t report hours you haven’t actually completed as though they’re already finished.

Your application should maximize your accomplishments without exaggerating them.

2. Your Dates Don’t Match

This sounds tiny.

It isn’t always tiny.

Maybe your CASPA experience section says you started a position in January, but another portion of your application indicates March.

Maybe the number of weeks you entered doesn’t align with your start and end dates.

Maybe you’ve listed an experience as ongoing even though you’ve already left the position.

One small typo probably isn’t going to destroy an otherwise excellent application.

But multiple inconsistencies can make an application feel careless—or worse, make an admissions committee question which information is accurate.

Before submitting, compare your:

• Employment dates
• Experience dates
• Total weeks
• Average weekly hours
• Completed versus anticipated hours
• Academic timeline

Everything should tell the same story.

3. You’re Missing or Using Incorrect Supervisor Information

Don’t treat the supervisor/contact section like an afterthought.

When CASPA asks for information associated with an experience, provide accurate information whenever it’s requested.

And please don’t invent a contact because you’ve lost touch with someone.

If you’re unsure whom to list for an older experience, figure that out before you’re staring at the submit button at 11:47 p.m.

Your experiences should be something you would feel completely comfortable having a program verify.

4. You’ve Put Experiences in the Wrong Categories

Patient care experience and healthcare experience are not automatically interchangeable.

Neither are volunteering and shadowing.

And just because you worked in a healthcare setting doesn’t necessarily mean your experience qualifies as PCE for every PA program.

This gets especially important because individual PA programs may define and evaluate experience differently.

Don’t choose the category that sounds the most impressive.

Choose the category that accurately represents what you did, follow current CASPA instructions, and check the requirements of your individual programs.

5. Your Experience Descriptions Sound Like Job Listings

This:

“Responsible for providing patient care, obtaining vital signs, assisting providers, and documenting information.”

…doesn’t tell us much about you or your strongest skills in each role.

One of the biggest missed opportunities we see is applicants writing vague, generic descriptions.

Your description should clearly communicate what you actually did.

What were your SPECIFIC and STRONGEST responsibilities?

How much patient interaction did you have?

What skills did you use?

What did your role expose you to?

What makes this experience relevant to the person and future PA you’re becoming?

You don’t need to turn every experience into a dramatic personal statement.

But don’t waste valuable application real estate on generic filler either.

6. Your Application Contains Contradictory Information

One discrepancy may be a typo.

Five discrepancies start to become a pattern.

If your job title changes between sections, dates don’t line up, responsibilities are described differently, or other details contradict each other, you’re creating questions that never needed to exist.

Your goal is simple:

Make your application easy to trust and easy to understand.

An admissions committee shouldn’t have to play detective to figure out what you actually did.

7. You’re Presenting Future Hours as Completed Hours

You’re planning to continue working another six months.

Great.

Those future hours are not the same as hours you’ve already completed.

Be careful about the distinction between completed and anticipated experiences/hours, and follow CASPA’s current instructions when entering them.

NEVER claim hours that have not happened. It looks very dishonest.

PA schools want to know what you’ve actually accomplished by the appropriate point in the application process—not just what you hope to accomplish eventually.

8. You’ve Left Valuable Experiences Painfully Vague

Imagine you’ve spent 1,500 hours working directly with patients.

Then your description says:

“Worked with patients and assisted the medical team.”

But….WHAT DID YOU DO?!

You may know how impressive an experience was because you lived it.

The admissions committee didn’t.

They only know what you tell them.

Specificity matters.

Instead of simply saying you “provided patient care,” explain the actual responsibilities that defined your role.

Your experiences are evidence of the applicant you’ve become.

Don’t make admissions guess why they matter.

9. You’re Trying Too Hard to Make Something Sound Impressive

There’s a difference between strategically presenting your experience and embellishing it.

You absolutely SHOULD write confidently about what you’ve accomplished.

But don’t upgrade your responsibilities because you think the real version isn’t impressive enough.

Don’t imply that you independently performed duties you merely observed.

Don’t change a title to make it sound more clinical.

Don’t exaggerate leadership responsibilities.

And definitely don’t inflate hours.

You don’t need to manufacture an impressive application.

You need to communicate the strongest, most accurate version of the application you’ve actually earned.

10. You Didn’t Do a Final Application-Wide Audit

This may be the most preventable mistake on this entire list.

You’ve stared at CASPA for so long that your brain doesn’t even see the mistakes anymore.

You know what you meant to write, so that’s what your brain reads.

Before submitting, don’t just proofread your personal statement one more time.

Audit the entire application.

Look specifically for:

• Incorrect dates
• Incorrect hours
• Missing information
• Inconsistent job titles
• Experience categorization
• Typos in names and organizations
• Vague experience descriptions
• Duplicate information
• Completed versus anticipated hours
• Anything that doesn’t align across sections

Then have someone else review it.

Fresh eyes catch things tired applicant eyes don’t.

The Goal Isn’t a “Perfect” CASPA

Here’s what we DON’T want you to do after reading this:

Open CASPA and panic over every comma. 

Admissions committees understand that applicants are human.

The goal isn’t creating an application so flawless that nobody could possibly find a typo.

The goal is making sure preventable errors aren’t distracting from everything you’ve worked incredibly hard to accomplish.

Your CASPA should make it easy for an admissions committee to see:

You’re qualified.

Your experiences are credible.

You’ve prepared intentionally for PA school.

And you’re someone they want to learn more about in an interview.

You’ve spent YEARS building the application.

Don’t let preventable mistakes weaken it in the final few feet before the finish line.

Before You Hit Submit…

If you’ve reached the point where it’s time to submit, get your entire application edited first – including your personal statement, all of your CASPA experience paragraphs for every section, and your life and AI essay.

At Pre-PA Clinic, our CASPA application editing is completed by PAs with actual PA school admissions committee experience.

We don’t just look for typos.

We help you identify weak descriptions, confusing information, missed opportunities, inconsistencies, and areas where your application could communicate your strengths more effectively.

Because you don’t need to submit an application.

You want to submit the strongest application you can.

Get your CASPA application here before you hit submit.