how med school classes are taught?

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I was just wondering if difficulty of the verbal reasoning section on MCAT is useful in actual life of med school.
How are med school classes taught?
Is it greatly different from how college classes are taught?

Thank You

Originally Posted by yankies90

I was just wondering if difficulty of the verbal reasoning section on MCAT is useful in actual life of med school.
How are med school classes taught?
Is it greatly different from how college classes are taught?

Thank You

Being able to read an article and figure out what it means. Yea, that'll apply to pretty much anything you'll do for the rest of your life.

1) Understanding what you read is pretty useful in life, irrespective of your educational level.

2) Medical school curricula differ in methods (Lecture, PBL, etc.). You need to do your own research on what schools, and what learning pathways, are best for you.

Originally Posted by yankies90

I was just wondering if difficulty of the verbal reasoning section on MCAT is useful in actual life of med school.
How are med school classes taught?
Is it greatly different from how college classes are taught?

Thank You

Reading comprehension is important, but medical texts and scientific articles are written in a very different way than some of the stuff in MCAT passages - Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, etc. Some schools have lots of PBL. Mine was mostly large lectures which were similar to the big auditorium classes in UG. This only applies to MS1-2.

You sit in a large lecture hall (or my own office bc i never went to class)...and you watch lectures. There is generally less lecturer-student interaction. After the lecture is over you are forced to sit there for another 30 minutes while all the gunners ask questions about something that they could have easily googled.....while the rest of the class is puking and calling them douchebags. Thats about it.

Originally Posted by willen101383

You sit in a large lecture hall (or my own office bc i never went to class)...and you watch lectures. There is generally less lecturer-student interaction. After the lecture is over you are forced to sit there for another 30 minutes while all the gunners ask questions about something that they could have easily googled.....while the rest of the class is puking and calling them douchebags. Thats about it.

This is one model. Another model is very limited large lecture hall teaching and more small group work: discussing ideas based on assigned readings (professionalism, medical ethics, etc), working through problem sets (clinical epidemiology), problem based learning (identify knowledge deficits, work independently and as a group to address the deficits, using newly acquired information to answer a question).

Originally Posted by yankies90

I was just wondering if difficulty of the verbal reasoning section on MCAT is useful in actual life of med school.
How are med school classes taught?
Is it greatly different from how college classes are taught?

Thank You

Like most of the MCAT, absolutely useless in every form and fashion.

Originally Posted by LizzyM

This is one model. Another model is very limited large lecture hall teaching and more small group work: discussing ideas based on assigned readings (professionalism, medical ethics, etc), working through problem sets (clinical epidemiology), problem based learning (identify knowledge deficits, work independently and as a group to address the deficits, using newly acquired information to answer a question).

My personal experience has been lectures are where material is covered/reenforced whereas most of these PBL/problem sets end up being busywork.

Originally Posted by ucbsmd

My personal experience has been lectures are where material is covered/reenforced whereas most of these PBL/problem sets end up being busywork.

That's your perspective as an MS-1. I was talking with some M-4 students last week and they looked back at PBL as the way medicine really works; you need to learn to look up and digest material quickly on the wards when you come up against something unfamiliar. You are learning skills you will use later (or at least we hope you are learning them).

Originally Posted by ucbsmd

My personal experience has been lectures are where material is covered/reenforced whereas most of these PBL/problem sets end up being busywork.

Originally Posted by LizzyM

That's your perspective as an MS-1. I was talking with some M-4 students last week and they looked back at PBL as the way medicine really works; you need to learn to look up and digest material quickly on the wards when you come up against something unfamiliar. You are learning skills you will use later (or at least we hope you are learning them).

MS-4 here, and I agree with ucbsmd. The problem with PBL is that I think it is a terribly inefficient way to learn things from square 1. You need to have the foundations of the basic sciences already learned before application can take place in a meaningful way. Otherwise, you just get really good at relying on resources to look things up.

Maybe somewhere has perfected PBL and it is more useful than the settings we had it in.

Interesting because this week's New England Journal of Medicine has a physician and business professor making the argument that more time should be spent engaging in learning that is "sticky". Rather than professors "giving speeches", students should review the material at home the night before and then come in and engage in work that makes one curious to find the answer. That's what 'looking things up" means, right? I wish I could link it here but NEJM doesn't give articles away for free until 6 mos after publication.

Becoming a Physician: Lecture Halls without Lectures — A Proposal for Medical Education
C.G. Prober and C. Heath | N Engl J Med 2012;366:1657-1659

I would HATE PBL for my primary learning of the material. But I do think cases would be a really good way to go about things once you have a background. I feel like we could have finished M2 in december if not sooner and then spent the rest of the year doing daily UNGRADED PBL sessions. We had an emergency medicine class my last trimester of M2 and it sounded like a great idea except you were graded on participation. So when the attending asked a question it question it became an explosion of verbal diarrhea and you literally got nothing out of it. You cant just tell med students they are being graded on participation!! Not to mention everyone viewed it as a burden because we just wanted to focus on boards. By having that type of class early on it would be PART of the initial boards prep vs distracting from it. In addition to E med we had clinical cases every few weeks but the cases were handed out before hand...so we all know what happens then. Verbal diarrhea again, this time from the gunners. If you didnt know the case beforehand everyone would get to pick their brains for a DDx vs just one or 2 people spouting off everything.

Here I am 4 weeks away from starting rotations and I have all this knowledge, yet I feel completely lacking in how to apply it. Granted that will come during this coming year and 4th year...but it would have been nice to have a start.

Originally Posted by LizzyM

Interesting because this week's New England Journal of Medicine has a physician and business professor making the argument that more time should be spent engaging in learning that is "sticky". Rather than professors "giving speeches", students should review the material at home the night before and then come in and engage in work that makes one curious to find the answer. That's what 'looking things up" means, right? I wish I could link it here but NEJM doesn't give articles away for free until 6 mos after publication.

Becoming a Physician: Lecture Halls without Lectures — A Proposal for Medical Education
C.G. Prober and C. Heath | N Engl J Med 2012;366:1657-1659

THIS holy crap. I dont know how others learn but I dont learn by listening to a talking head. If you make me SEARCH for that answer I will never forget it. Even more so if you make me search for an answer, I am subsequently wrong, and then I locate the correct answer. I think many are like me. I think a lot of med schools are trying to go this direction (ie cases and such) but they are just so poorly implemented nobody gets anything out of it.

Originally Posted by LizzyM

Interesting because this week's New England Journal of Medicine has a physician and business professor making the argument that more time should be spent engaging in learning that is "sticky". Rather than professors "giving speeches", students should review the material at home the night before and then come in and engage in work that makes one curious to find the answer. That's what 'looking things up" means, right? I wish I could link it here but NEJM doesn't give articles away for free until 6 mos after publication.

Becoming a Physician: Lecture Halls without Lectures — A Proposal for Medical Education
C.G. Prober and C. Heath | N Engl J Med 2012;366:1657-1659

Ok I will do that with a book and Kaplan videos, AND WIKIPEDIA, obviating the need for lecturers to lecture. Then we can invite clinicians to go over clinical cases in PBL and call it med school.