I'd like to make you all aware that UAMS is undergoing some pretty dramatic changes in the basic sciences curriculum. Exactly why they're blowing things up so substantially is a mystery to me since I thought they actually had things pretty close to perfect when I went through. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because our Step scores have been pretty poor over the last couple years, but they're going about it all wrong. Rumor has it that the LCGME is mandating more team learning and some other things, for whatever reason, so that's going to happen. I'm fairly removed from the situation and thus don't know the nitty-gritty, but I do have fairly strong opinions on some of the changes they've made or are making. That is to say, I don't think they're helping students out at all. Since he's intimately involved in this situation, Matt knows more about what's going down, but I thought I'd toss the warning out there, anyway: a lot more required attendance and PBL-type stuff is on the horizon.
That said, the clinical curriculum, which has always been this school's strength, is still the same as it has been and continues to improve. You will still get a solid pre-clinical background, obviously, but you may not have the free time or cohesion within the curriculum that I enjoyed. I can't say they got it totally right for us, but at least what they did made sense.
Ah, this is a good thing to mention since most answers we can provide to class-related questions on here are based off the current curriculum which isn't going to help you future students out at all. So ignore our answers on those issues
😀. As for what's going on, here's what I know at this point:
UAMS's current curriculum is very lecture heavy with things like TBLs (Team-based learning sessions), PBLs (Problem based learning), and labs interspersed. You all probably already know this. The reason this is becoming an issue is the LCME is pushing for more active learning at medical schools. They have studies and such that show active learning leads to better student performance and such that they're using to support this stance, and armed with that data they've apparently made standards about how much active learning they want to see at medical schools. The University of Texas at San Antonio recently went under review and had their accreditation placed on probation for not being in line with these "recommendations" on active learning vs. lecture. This threw up a red flag for the administration here since compared to UT San Antonio, UAMS has even more hours of lecture and less of the TBL/PBL/SDL format. UAMS is up for review by the LCME in 2014, and if the curriculum is left as-is, the administration is confident they would be placed on probation. Although that doesn't mean they would lose accreditation, it wouldn't look good and it would be a step in that direction. So.... they're going through a drastic revamp of the curriculum to be implemented before their accreditation is up for renewal. For those of you that aren't sure how important this is- if you don't graduate from an LCME accredited program, that pretty much means no medical license or ACGME accredited residency program for you. So it's at least moderately important.
We all have some concerns about this of course, but they are taking input from students and I've already heard some promising things about the revised curriculum. Hours of lecture per week during the M1/M2 years will be reduced to 30-40% of on-campus time, and the actual on-campus overall time is going to come down to 16-20 hours/week to allow for more self-study time. This will almost definitely mean more SDLs in place of some lecture content. Of the on campus time, 6 hours per week are supposed to be PBL/TBL/similar from here on out as well. One thing I like about this is that it essentially forces courses to be more high-yield with their lectures and improve the design of TBL/PBL sessions. They will also provide a list of weekly objectives and specific resources to accomplish those objectives. What I'm happiest about is that since this process is forcing drastic changes in how the curriculum is run, things like required books/course formatting are being discussed openly among all the course directors at once. The recent Step score issue, particularly last year's failure rate, has also been a big talking point and is steering the discussion towards using more high-yield "review" books as required texts over regular text books and making test question material and format even more Step 1 like. This
should mean that courses overall are better run and benefit from the best practices of some existing courses. I'm interested to see how it all plays out. Even though it won't directly affect or benefit me, it could be very important for future students and their performance on Step.
UTMB Galveston, which has similar admitted student profiles when compared to UAMS, made similar changes in the early 2000s and their average Step scores went from a bit below the national average to considerably above. Their Step average has increased at a faster rate than UAMS's and is currently 20 points higher than ours, so they must be doing something right.
I apologize for how long that is, but it should preemptively answer most future curriculum related questions you all might have.
-Matt
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