Great post. Only addendum I would make to this is: PCM and OMM have been combined now into one class called ECOS. It amounted to about 4 SPE encounters that were not graded, 1 that was called a CSA, and mostly 4 hours a week of OMM per semester. Once anatomy lab starts up after 3 weeks of SFM, we would have 2 days a week where it was 2 hours of OMM + 2 hours of anatomy lab back to back from 8am-12pm. However, ECOS would usually finish a few weeks before the main class at the end of the semester, so you would have no OMM during those weeks. Maybe that averages out to 2-3 hours a week in total, but for the most part expect 4 hours of OMM a week now. Most people do nothing for ECOS stuff until right before a practical or right before an exam, and then you just end up losing 1-5 days of study time cramming for it. The first OMM practical for us was notoriously bad because it covered a ton of material that no one was dedicating any time to, so everyone I know ended up spending a solid 5ish days studying for it. It worked out because it was during a 5-week MSK section (meaning we had 5 weeks before the exam, so losing 1 week wasn't that painful). The plus side is they make it very easy to pass the retake of failures of anything you have to pass in OMM. Also, all future practicals are much quicker to study for as well, since they end up being more of the same thing but just on different regions of the body. SFM had an exam after 1 week and then the next one 2 weeks later, but for the most part exams were spaced out every 3-5 weeks.
So the downside is it sounds like we had more OMM than previous years, but the upside is all of the horror stories I have heard from upper classmen about their systems blocks being one giant exam sometimes and things like that have all been fixed. The start of the year, they especially make the transition easier for students because the first class of SFM is broken into two exams that each give you two tries per, only keeping your best score. So the way it was structured is you will start orientation mid July, and it will last two weeks. Near the end of that, they will release do-it-yourself online Canvas basic immunology and biochem material that you do in the form of multiple quizzes. This material will not be tested in any other way than the quizzes. It basically serves as a grade booster. Then SFM officially starts and you have your first exam that Friday (so only 1 week to prepare). It's a ton of material, but if you don't like your score, you can take another version of the exam on Monday, giving you the weekend to study more, and your highest score is the one kept. Then the same thing happens again 2 weeks later. Then SFM is over, and you move on to MSK with anatomy lab.
I'd like to add my perspective on KCU's curriculum. Honestly, one of my biggest problems with this school is its ridiculous curriculum. I knew it would be bad once I heard the staff say that we have
"board-style in-house exams" during orientation. What does this mean for you? It means for most classes, you can't rely solely on third-party resources to pass tests (most med students use Anking and other sources like pathoma and sketchy). This makes studying for exams quite difficult because you have to spend a ridiculous amount of time watching in-house lectures just to learn information that will never come up on board exams. On top of this, you'll find that most professors here are not good at teaching (except for a few absolute gems).
Professors here tend to teach these subjects like we're getting PhD's in every biological science field, even though most of what we learn in lectures is completely irrelevant to boards and will never come up while we are working in clinical settings. There is also a stupidly high emphasis on embryology in this school and it's very poorly taught. Also KCU is not a true P/F system because we have a "high pass"(not a huge deal bc most PD's don't rank prelim classes as huge factors for accepting or denying you for residency, but it still adds a lot of pressure).
To make matters worse, the scheduling is not conducive to a good learning environment. You will find that there's not much time to take breaks throughout certain parts of the year. Even when you do have breaks, there's no easing into the grove of things again. They expect you to be in a full sprint the moment you get back. The timing of ECOS exams, practicals, SPE's, and useless courses that admins force us to take, not only
takes away time for you to study for your main exams, it doesn't allow you to develop a solid routine (it's kind of hard to explain how infuriating the schedule is unless you've experienced this schedule). One of the worst blocks we had was Cardiopulmonary and renal, in which after the first exam we had 3 weeks to study close to 25 lectures, and the very next exam, we had two weeks to study around the same amount. It was virtually impossible for most of us.
We even had one professor during a lecture acknowledge that our curriculum was much more rigorous than that of most medical schools and that it did not allocate the proper amount of time to review lecture material. This problem could easily be alleviated if this school just switched to teaching exactly like board exams but so far they refuse to.
Going back to the criticisms of professors,
many professors here are nice people, but they just simply are not good at presenting information in a way that is understandable. Their lecture slides are very wordy, concepts are often hard to visualize, and you will often encounter test questions on material that was never even presented on to begin with. Lecturers have gone past the allotted amount of time to finish lecture material even when given 2 hours to do so. It's very unprofessional. And that's not just me saying it, the president of our school himself said during orientation that a speaker going beyond the allotted amount of time is unprofessional.
Oftentimes, the expectations that are set on students are not set for the staff and faculty.
The accumulation of all these factors and more has resulted in a lot of mental anguish personally for me and for pretty much all of my classmates that aren't consistently getting high scores.
LOTS of first and second years are remediating 1 or two classes. A fair number end up repeating the first year. I know for a fact that
in one year, 50 students had to remediate neuroanatomy. I'm quite sure that half of our class would not even pass these classes if it wasn't for the curve.
If a medical school has such a significant number of students remediating and relies on curves to pass most of the class, then it's safe to say that either the exam questions are bad, the teaching is bad, or the scheduling is bad.
At KCU, all 3 of these things are true.
I've got a whole other laundry list of problems with this school which I'm too lazy to type out in this post, but long story short, if you want to go to medical school and feel some semblance of sanity,
try your damn hardest to get into an MD school. DO schools just have too much baggage (some more than others of course). If I was at an MD school, I would be killing it right now and so would most of my classmates. Overall, I would not recommend enrolling here. KCU students succeed in spite of this school, not because of it.
If you have other career options that allow you to achieve a lifestyle you're content with, I would honestly just go for those. Medicine is an incredibly exploitive field with hospital execs/admins raking in record profits while compensation for doctors has declined. Doctors have not had a cost of living adjustment since the 1990s. Tuition is being increased every year despite inflation. It is simply not worth the cost anymore unless you have nothing else going for you.
