All the negative things you have been hearing about UF is true. UF is trying to build up their reputation and ranking as a prestigious school and are doing it at the expense of the students. It's a sink or swim school. If you decide to go to UF, be prepared to work hard and get through on your own because the faculty and administration are not sympathetic. You will be pounded with information from so many classes that you won't even remember what teachers taught what in certain semesters. The grading scale is ridiculous - >94A, >87B, >80C. I remember our oral surgery course had about half the class fail and 15 still failed after remediation. Most of the tests are designed to trick you with many k-type questions. You know the ones that have multiple choices within multiple choices. If you have problems in school, don't expect the school to step in and offer you tutoring. They'll send your ass to Student Performance Evaluation Committee(SPEC) and warn you to shape up or ship out. Boards part I used to be the 1st week of December of 2nd year which stacked the cards against you. You are studying to pass your classes and finals and they give you about 4 days to study for boards! After boards, we had about 3 final exams to take for our classes! What genious thought of this schedule?! School is year round at UF and I do emphasize YEAR ROUND! You'll never feel like you get a full break to rest because classes continue from one semester to the next. I remember studying for a quiz over Christmas break and studying for exams over our short summer break which was like 3 weeks. The manikin situation is not true. Each person has their own bc the class size is 80. what you will fight over are chairs when you start seeing patients. You will have to complete your requirements and will sometimes run around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to complete them. Seniors will have prioritiy over the lack of chairs and the frustration to attain one to see your patients is crazy. We lost some students in our class, but I know that if they had gone elsewhere they would have ok. Our standard is a 2.5 gpa while others are 2.0. This may not sound much, but if you factor in the grading scale, you better be making at least 85% to pass bc a "C" ain't passing here. If you plan on specializing, you will want to put the grading scale into consideration. A's are tough to come by here. Hell, B's can be hard too. I have friends who went to Nova and their scale was 70,80,90 like a normal scale should be. I have to agree with one of the posters and say that you should spend the extra $ to go elsewhere like Nova. They definitely are pro-students there and the facilities are nice and new. Sure, it costs more than double UF, but you'll be much happier there. Some interesting tidbits for you: class of 2000 had about 12 failures on state boards and class of 2002 had 15 failures on natl boards part 1. it's all attributed to the overload of coarses and not enough preparation or not allowing students enough preparation. Good luck.
