do some med schools just suck???

[QuantumMechanic]

So tonight I visited with an old friend that goes to a certain state med school in the south. I was talking to him and his other friends that attend this med school, and here was some of their comments:

"The lectures are useless, sometimes its under 10 percent of the class attending"

"They have tests so often, yet these tests count for such a small part of the grade that the hours needed to study for them are essentially wasted, plus you are forced to cram material that you learned that previous day for the test"

"The facilities pretty much blow, my friend who goes to [I forgot which school] says that they at least have a well ventilated anatomy lab, so it doesn't smell soooooo bad."

"My advice to you is to run to the furthest medical school from here."

"Anyone attending here from out of state is fcking stupid"

"The administration holds conferences with us and asks us what can be done to improve the education, yet all our simple suggestions go unanswered."

"Doesn't Harvard do problem based learning? Why aren't we trying to mimic the best school in the country? Then why do we still memorize the medically useless **** that they make the PhD students learn? Are we trying to become PhD geneticists?"

"If you have an average board score from here, residency programs will think that you will be a bad doctor."

"They say they don't teach to the boards since they want us to be good clinicians, and they don't seems to care when many students fail to get a sufficient board score to get into a specialty they desire (not derm or anything exotic like that either)."

overall everyone i talked to seemed to think this school was the pits and that with my above average mcat score, i should try to go to a nicer school...looks like i won't be attending my state school

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[letmein!please?]

So tonight I visited with an old friend that goes to a certain state med school in the south. I was talking to him and his other friends that attend this med school, and here was some of their comments:

"The lectures are useless, sometimes its under 10 percent of the class attending"

"They have tests so often, yet these tests count for such a small part of the grade that the hours needed to study for them are essentially wasted, plus you are forced to cram material that you learned that previous day for the test"

"The facilities pretty much blow, my friend who goes to [I forgot which school] says that they at least have a well ventilated anatomy lab, so it doesn't smell soooooo bad."

"My advice to you is to run to the furthest medical school from here."

"Anyone attending here from out of state is fcking stupid"

"The administration holds conferences with us and asks us what can be done to improve the education, yet all our simple suggestions go unanswered."

"Doesn't Harvard do problem based learning? Why aren't we trying to mimic the best school in the country? Then why do we still memorize the medically useless **** that they make the PhD students learn? Are we trying to become PhD geneticists?"

"If you have an average board score from here, residency programs will think that you will be a bad doctor."

"They say they don't teach to the boards since they want us to be good clinicians, and they don't seems to care when many students fail to get a sufficient board score to get into a specialty they desire (not derm or anything exotic like that either)."

overall everyone i talked to seemed to think this school was the pits and that with my above average mcat score, i should try to go to a nicer school...looks like i won't be attending my state school

What school(s) are these from?

 

[calvinandhobbes]

i think i can guess which one the well-ventilated lab is from...is it a little school in valhalla?

 

[Fermata]

Cry me a river.

 

[Dave_med]

What school(s) are these from?

If not the schools.......how about the state?

 

[Law2Doc]

So tonight I visited with an old friend that goes to a certain state med school in the south. I was talking to him and his other friends that attend this med school, and here was some of their comments:

"The lectures are useless, sometimes its under 10 percent of the class attending"

"They have tests so often, yet these tests count for such a small part of the grade that the hours needed to study for them are essentially wasted, plus you are forced to cram material that you learned that previous day for the test"

"The facilities pretty much blow, my friend who goes to [I forgot which school] says that they at least have a well ventilated anatomy lab, so it doesn't smell soooooo bad."

"My advice to you is to run to the furthest medical school from here."

"Anyone attending here from out of state is fcking stupid"

"The administration holds conferences with us and asks us what can be done to improve the education, yet all our simple suggestions go unanswered."

"Doesn't Harvard do problem based learning? Why aren't we trying to mimic the best school in the country? Then why do we still memorize the medically useless **** that they make the PhD students learn? Are we trying to become PhD geneticists?"

"If you have an average board score from here, residency programs will think that you will be a bad doctor."

"They say they don't teach to the boards since they want us to be good clinicians, and they don't seems to care when many students fail to get a sufficient board score to get into a specialty they desire (not derm or anything exotic like that either)."

overall everyone i talked to seemed to think this school was the pits and that with my above average mcat score, i should try to go to a nicer school...looks like i won't be attending my state school

The issues are all very common to med schools, but your friend's attitude is just bad. In most schools you will have low class attendance (due to the availability of computer-available video recorded lectures and note services, there will be multiple tests, and they will often cover material from the day prior (due to the quantity of info being jammed into a short semester). In all med schools you will be forced to memorize a ton of "PhD" type material you will never use. And most med schools don't use PBL to a great extent. And yes, anatomy labs smell -- it's hard to make formaldehyde soaked corpses smell like roses. Also, your friend want two opposing things -- he wants the schools to teach toward the boards, so the score will go up, and yet he wants them to do PBL (which at some places has actually had the opposite effect).
I think your friend has to accept that what he described is exactly what med school is, and has always been. Nobody hid this fact from him. That he expected something different or had no idea what he was getting into, is his own failing to research the situation when applying.

 

[DoctorFunk]

A little off topic here...but I wonder why so many people think that PBL is the greatest thing to hit medical education since legalized dissection. At my school we have a handful of PBL-style discussions with both a PhD and clinician attending, and I find that the questions and discussions are so basic that they add little to the knowledge base gained from lecture.

It seems to me that PBL is a fantastic endeavor in learning how to search the literature, but perhaps falls short in the department of instructing you in how to teach yourself medicine.

 

[Iwy Em Hotep]

And never mind that med students are just about the biggest whiners ever...and I'm a med student. Something about going from "desperate" pre-med to "entitled" MS1.