MIS had huge gaps in material needed for the USMLE - I needed to study that information on my own. MCM seemed to cover ~95% of the biochem material on the boards = awesome. MSI... well, the whole block seems really disorganized. Why are we learning about muscle contraction in the penultimate week of the course?
My advice to incoming students? Use review books (Goljin, First Aid, Katzung, BRS, Lippincott, Pathoma, whatever you like best) as soon as possible. They will fill in the holes in the curriculum so you can avoid the lower peak in that USMLE bimodal distribution mentioned earlier (not sure if it really exists, guess we will find out soon).
As I'm two iterations removed from the current basic science systems, can't comment on how they're organized - definitely agree that the structure will vary based on the course directors' goals.
However, I'd just like to caution y'all against focusing too much on what's covered by the USMLE for the following reasons:
1) Anything you're learning now will likely long be forgotten by the time you start dedicated studying for Step 1. Concepts I knew cold just a few months prior to our time off had to be relearned.
2) While it is important that UVa continuously tries to refine their units so that their value increases and they cover the core concepts, what's considered clinically important and what's important for Step 1 is sometimes unfortunately mutually exclusive. There are things listed in First Aid that are frankly bull**** for us to learn. It's not like medicine is a field lacking in information to test students on, so I'd rather UVa skip some of that stuff (who cares what agar I need to grow a certain bacteria?) to focus on things I'll actually use and learn that stuff on my own later. Blocks should still deliver info efficiently and effectively - I'm not excusing any deficiencies current first years might find in the current versions of systems - I just wouldn't measure their effectiveness by what's covered in Step 1 prep books.
3) This is somewhat a recap of point #1, but the value in using Step 1 resources during these units is in any annotations you make, not in anything you're retaining for the future (which will be next to nothing). Reading First Aid during GI, for instance, will give you an outline of what's important, allow you to write down some notes to flesh out concepts more than review books will themselves, show you some mnemonics to help you on the exam, etc. Will you remember any of that in the January before you take Step 1? No, but you'll have your notes to make re-learning it a little easier. I scored somewhere in the top 15% of our class for Step 1 and had pretty much forgotten most of what I'd studied a month after I took it - how much do you think is going to stick with you from a year before?
It sounds like my class (SMD14) did have a bimodal distribution for scores (while our average is up, the graph of scores comes up months later). Every class before us had a different breakdown in their ranges despite going through the same "old Gen" curriculum, so I'm not sure how much value there is in trying to interpret our distribution - especially as how it pertains to studying strategies...
