I failed a class earlier in the year and had to remediate that class over the summer. I was angry at myself after knowing I failed, so I studied a lot for the rest of the classes this year and ended up with 2 honors. Now I just finished my class remediation and passed that with an 88%. I'm wondering if my failing grade in that one class will be overlooked when I apply for residency. Do you guys think residencies will care less about my failing grade if they see that I have honors in the latter classes? Or, is that a bad sign that I had the ability to do well in class and honor, but didn't try until the end of the year?
Does failing a class and honoring another class cancel each other out?
- Thread starter Juis
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no one here will be able to predict what a residency will find important or not. Regardless of the circumstances a failing grade looks really bad. Also people on this board generally are the best students in the class with super high step scores.
HOWEVER, my advice (and I'm sure you already plan on doing this) is to get the absolute best grades you can the rest of med school and do as well as you can on step 1. This will make that failing grade less important because you can obvioulsy do the work and know the material. You will probably get asked about it during interviews but it won't be as big a deal with the rest of your record.
HOWEVER, my advice (and I'm sure you already plan on doing this) is to get the absolute best grades you can the rest of med school and do as well as you can on step 1. This will make that failing grade less important because you can obvioulsy do the work and know the material. You will probably get asked about it during interviews but it won't be as big a deal with the rest of your record.
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No it doesn't compensate. Obviously the honors looks good but failed classes are red flags. Gotta crush boards and not fail anything else.
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Actually it depends on the school. If remediation is allowed, and because med schools want their students to match, sometime they will just erase the failure and put in the remediation grade. Sometimes they do an average. Sometimes it shows up as both a failure then the retake.
The person you need to contact is the dean of academic affairs or the dean of student affairs, or the dean of medical education. Whatever its called at your school, you need to talk to him/her to see the outcome.
Of course, as DrBowtie said... don't fail anything else, k?
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Absolutely not. It's better to not honor a single class but not fail any, than to fail one class. Preclinical grades don't really matter unless you have some kind of red flag. Failing is one of those red flags.
Honoring 1 or 2 classes out of a year's worth of classes isn't exactly special anyway.
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Exactly how bad does it look that you failed one class? I failed+remediated a first-year course (i was having family issues while taking it), but the rest of my preclinical grades aren't stellar either. Pretty much just got a pass in everything. Am I doomed? 🙁
I'd love to kick ass on Step 1, but memorization just isn't my thing...never was. I always get the questions that require u to know little useless details wrong...
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I would guess it depends on what you want to do. I'd say you are doomed for derm, rad onc even before Step 1.
For most other specialties, rock the Step 1 and get some honors in 3rd year and you should still be fine. No one save for a few photographic memory types is good at memorization, you just need the repetitions.
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I would see if I can get the advice of someone that's not a medical student, and a little closer to the residency/pd. I'm not sure how helpful our opinions would be, seeing as how, well.. we actually don't really know.
Personally, if I were a PD, I could care less if a person failed a course if they rocked their Steps - **** happens, and it's silly to assume that a failure in a single class is a big enough red flag to bar someone from a residency - but that's just the opinion of [another] medical student that, again, doesn't really know very much about the process.
Personally, if I were a PD, I could care less if a person failed a course if they rocked their Steps - **** happens, and it's silly to assume that a failure in a single class is a big enough red flag to bar someone from a residency - but that's just the opinion of [another] medical student that, again, doesn't really know very much about the process.
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It can't possibly look good. And if you have 50 apps all with 240+ Step 1 scores and research like in Derm, you start using factors other than Step 1/M3 grades/LORs/publications to rank. Obviously for less competitive specialties it would matter much less and high Step 1 would easily overcome preclinical grades.
And it also depends on the school. At my school passing level is at 50-55. You would really have to drop the ball to fail. That can't look good on any Dean's letter. And it would annihilate any chance for you to be AOA.
And it also depends on the school. At my school passing level is at 50-55. You would really have to drop the ball to fail. That can't look good on any Dean's letter. And it would annihilate any chance for you to be AOA.
Thanks. At my school, failing is anything below 70%. I got a 67% in that class, and they made me do a 2 week remediation and retake of the final, which I passed with 88%. The dean says my transcript will show both unsatisfactory and satisfactory for that class.
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Many people honor all of their courses without failing one. You will be be explaining a failure on most interviews, so you have to be able to turn it into a "big life learning moment" or some other spin. No, an honors won't cancel it out. Honors are expected.
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a ******ed question? thread will get to page 3 at least
I can't remember what thread it was but someone said they failed a preclinical class and it was only brought up at one of their interviews.
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yup, 100% of the people are expected to be in the top 15% of the class 🙄
i would say PASSING is expected ...so not passing is a problem
however, OP, the answer to your question is "so what?" ...what's done is done ....do your best from here on out and thing will fall into place down the road
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No real point bringing it up -- it's out there and it either prevents you from getting the interview or it doesn't. Most places have scarce enough interview slots that they can deem anyone who gets one to be in the ballpark of acceptable. I mean, what is the person going to say -- "I didn't know how to study/had a bad start/had a lot of other things going on in my life... but as you can see I got things straightened out". You don't really need to ask the question to know what the likely canned answer will be.
As to the initial question, a fail is going to stand out. Honors won't be as big a deal. Honestly, PDs don't focus on grades as much as evals if you pass, but they usually find something like a failed course hard to overlook.
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Nope. If it remains visible on your final transcript, it won't be overlooked. PD's probably look at applicants pre-clinical transcripts like a baseline CBC and Chem-7:
"nice, good, good, ok......... good, fine, good, nice, ok, good, WOAH! is this guy taking his insulin?"
Average or good pre-clinical grades are seen as "normal", and the PD won't put much stock in that part of the application. But if theres a red flag, then suddenly the test becomes relevant.
Thanks for the honest feedback. I guess there isn't anything I can do to make that fail less of an issue. It's going to be an uphill battle for the rest of my med school years, but I think I'm going to still go for the specialty I've been interested in for a while, even though it's a highly competitive one. If I can get a residency somewhere in the US, that'll be good enough for me. I'll just keep trying my best.
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If you have already chosen a specialty, get yourself a faculty member in the field as a mentor and ask him to look at your CV and stats and give it to you straight. He can give you better advice than all of us online since he will know the various programs in the specialty and will be privy to your credentials. It might still be a salvageable situation, or it might not. But rather than plod forward on a path you cannot get, sometimes it's best to know early on what's possible or realistic and what's not.
Thanks Law2Doc, that's great advice! I do have a faculty mentor in the field who I've shadowed before, but I haven't told him about my failed class. I'm just afraid I might get shunned and won't be able to get a good letter from him later on. Do you guys think I should ask a different faculty member or would it be all right to spill the beans to my mentor?
Also wanted to add that my mentor is one of the big wigs in the field, though he's pretty friendly. I just don't want to screw up the relationship since if I were to rotate at my home program, he would be my attending/letter writer.
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He is your mentor. You need to be honest with him. If he writes a letter in support of you without knowing, he might catch some grief from other people in his field when they read his letter and look at your transcript.
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This is exactly why grades shouldn't count at all. At my school, 69 is failing and the class average is frequently in the 70's. Once, the average was even failing, but they had to curve that one or half the class would have failed. It's not uncommon for 8-10 people to fail any given class and many more to fail a test.
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meanwhile at WashU: 80% honors is below average.
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Half the class gets honors then. Insane.
