current Brody M3 dropping in again with a word of advice based on a conversation I just had with an M3 friend at another school.
some of you who have been accepted will be fortunate enough to be holding more than one acceptance. when you're trying to make your decision, see if you can find an M3 at each school to talk to, and ask them how rotation grades are weighted/curved. I was talking to my friend and he's having a miserable third year because of the way rotations are graded at his school. evals alone make up 50 percent of their grade, and there are only so many people in each cohort who can get honors or high pass on any given rotation, so it's curved and you're essentially competing against the rest of your class for the grade. and, as a result, one person deciding to give you straight 3/5s could sink your chances at getting honors or high pass.
I was shocked, because here it isn't like that at all. our rotation grades are honors/A/B/C/F (preclinical has moved to P/F as of this year), and it's hard to get honors because you have to score at least 80th percentile on the shelf exam, in addition to some other requirements that vary from rotation to rotation, but there's no limit to how many people can honor a rotation if they hit those requirements. certainly no limit to how many people can get an A. and evals don't make up more than 30 to 40 percent of our grade (on one rotation it might break down as evals 30 percent, final OSCE 30 percent, shelf 30 percent, assignments 10 percent, for example), and all 3s from one person certainly won't kill you - I've had three rotations where at least one person has given me straight 3s and I've still been doing quite well. this is partly because Brody recognizes that evals can be subjective and (for the most part) treats them accordingly - they straight up told us on IM that even if your eval average was all 3s that would still equate to a score of 89/100 on evals alone by their calculations, so you could easily pull it up to an A if you did well on the other stuff.
since we don't have to compete against each other for our grades, we're very collaborative, or at least my class has been. I've developed great relationships with classmates I didn't know at all before this year, solely because we ended up on a rotation together and had each other's backs. my friend isn't having that experience and I feel awful for him because I had no idea anywhere did it like that.
make sure you find out about these things, if you can, because right now as a rising M1 it probably doesn't feel like it matters but it will matter very much in just a couple of years.
I'm not on here all that frequently but feel free to DM me with any questions about this or anything else.