Thanks Race, I appreciate the response. By this do you mean the unapproachability of faculty related to questions on the exams? If so, I think this is almost a universal issue with medical schools, at least from what I have heard. I am used to being able to discuss exam questions with professors for clarification purposes etc. It will definitely be a big change for me not being able to do this as frequently.
Out of curiosity though, what happened with the quizzes?
Thanks again!
Here is my interpretation of Racewad's comment. Although the lectures are streamed from Pomona, we have a full complement of anatomy faculty to run the labs and give lectures from time to time. Although they are absolutely amazing and knowledgeable, they do not write the exam questions. The professor who gives the lecture on the stream is the one who does. From time to time, we do run into contradictions between individuals on certain details, and the detail that you do want to know and answer for the exam are the ones by the professor who writes the questions and is located down in Pomona. This makes it hard for us to sometime grab a hold of the Pomona professor for clarification, since our options are limited to email and during class time. These issues do come up, but for the most part it doesn't really affect the overall outcome since lecture notes are pretty comprehensive and most facts you need to know is on there somewhere.
Quizzes: They are 5 question clicker quizzes administered at the start of a lecture. Think of it as roll call, since you only need to score 3/5 questions right to get 1-point for the day. The botched quizzes mentioned was the fact that Lebanon connects remotely to a server to register our clicker answers. During 2 days, our server crashed midway through the test for Lebanon so Pomona did not receive our answers. Everybody was given full credit for the quizzes, although the IT people did take up a lot of class time trying to fix the glitch before giving up. Technical difficulties happen, but for the most part things haven't been bad and have been steadily improving for the better. If anything, I would say the clicker portion of things go much smoother in Lebanon than Pomona. They have over 300 students in their class and if there is someone's clicker is malfunctioning, it's from down there and not up here.
What I do like is how the school makes every effort to overcome glitches. At the very beginning, one lecture's time got cut in half due to technical difficulties and the professor had to rush through his material (which no longer really happen, it should be a non-issue by next year). The school responded to this by putting up the recorded lecture for that day's material from last year's class.
The school does say attendance is mandatory and "enforces" it by having a clicker quiz at the beginning of lecture as I mentioned above. But once you've submitted your answers, nobody stops you from leaving, and they never administer more than one quiz a day per subject. If you don't care about getting the point, then you don't need to show up. People won't get on your case about it, unless you start doing poorly in class. Same with dress code, we were worried that there would be a strict dress code, but people have been dressing up however they please.
I write a lot, but I hope this information is helpful to any of you who choose to read it. This campus is pretty awesome and I'm really enjoying my experiences here. Many of the "issues" brought up now will be probably resolved long before you start class. We have monthly town hall meetings with the dean to voice our opinions on aspects that work and don't work, so that she can make changes to make this school a better place. One person asked for more trash cans, and by the next day, there they were!
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. good luck with any other interviews that you have
