Clinical Grading Distributions

[dantt]

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I was was wondering if any of you guys know the grading distribution at your school during clinical years.

At my school, it appears if you do "well," you'll receive a high pass by default and kids who do poorly get pass and exceptional is honors. Low pass or below, we have to go before a committee. However, friends at other schools describe grading distributions where approximately half the students receive high pass or above and half receive pass or below so pass can't be that bad there...

How good (or bad) is pass at your school? High pass?

 

[pseudoknot]

Top 15%: Honors
Next 35%: High Pass
Bottom 50%: Pass (maybe a few marginal or fail)

 

[ZagDoc]

Varies by rotation at my institution, each department has their own rubrick and way of shaking things out. Certain rotations its damn near impossible to get honors with the way certain things are weighted (for example, I'm on my family medicine rotation, and our preceptor eval counts for 80% of our grade. One clinician's, who I work with less than half the time, opinion of me. Doesn't matter how I do on the shelf or if I'm stellar on all the other busy work they throw us, if that one clinician does not give me a 10, H is toast. On our surgery rotation, if you do not hit a certain % mark on the shelf exam well above simply 'passing', H is off the table.) Other rotations I've been through, like psych, are more gratuitous with their honors, where as long as you show up, are cordial, act interested, and jump through all the hoops, honors is yours to lose. On my peds rotation, they plugged everything into a formula to compute "total points" then assigned honors on a bell curve made up all the scores of students from the past couple years.

Yeah, it's a mess.

 

[psipsina]

Ours are rotations specific too. For peds they averaged various evaluations with your shelf, and curved it all so a certain percent got honors. For medicine you can't honor if either your evals or your shelf don't = honor (the shelf is curved so a certain percent honor it). So all your evals could be honors but if you high pass the shelf by a point thats it. And apparently they hand out honors on evals like candy in this department. It seems to be pretty subjective in general. Some kids who rotated at another hospital said that very few people get honors there so those kids are automatically at a disadvantage by where they were assigned to rotate.

 

[Whats_up_doc]

Ours are rotations specific too. For peds they averaged various evaluations with your shelf, and curved it all so a certain percent got honors. For medicine you can't honor if either your evals or your shelf don't = honor (the shelf is curved so a certain percent honor it). So all your evals could be honors but if you high pass the shelf by a point thats it. And apparently they hand out honors on evals like candy in this department. It seems to be pretty subjective in general. Some kids who rotated at another hospital said that very few people get honors there so those kids are automatically at a disadvantage by where they were assigned to rotate.

So for example if you get high pass (B) in most of your rotations except psych, Surgery and Surgery Sub I (Honors - A) or IM, IM Sub I (A) how would this be looked at on the match?

 

[psipsina]

So for example if you get high pass (B) in most of your rotations except psych, Surgery and Surgery Sub I (Honors - A) or IM, IM Sub I (A) how would this be looked at on the match?

My understanding is that its most important to honor whatever you are trying to match. I know surgery cares about medicine too (I think most do). Beyond that I think the more the better. All things being equal a student who honors everything is going to have some advantage (of course all things are never equal with subjectives like letters and interviews in the mix). Third year grades are weighted pretty heavily in the whole thing too.

 

[dantt]

All this being said about the inconsistency of honors...how "bad" or "okay" is just passing? If passing is so called bottom 50%, that's actually not that bad I would htink, is it? Obviously you want to honor whatever you want to go into but that's probably not possible if only about 15% of students get honors.

 

[ZagDoc]

All this being said about the inconsistency of honors...how "bad" or "okay" is just passing? If passing is so called bottom 50%, that's actually not that bad I would htink, is it? Obviously you want to honor whatever you want to go into but that's probably not possible if only about 15% of students get honors.

Passing is fine. SDN tends to coagulate together the personality types that stress over the number of H's they accumulate, but most people get a pass or two or three or more in 3rd year. Hell some only pass. But that tells residency directors that you meet the expected competency of your level, that there were no gross deficiencies in your abilities or knowledge, and no behavioral or professional conduct concerns.

 

[goodoldalky]

Top 10% Honors
Next 20% High Pass
~70% Pass
More than 1.5 SD below the mean = Marginal
More than 2 SD below the mean = Fail