Dropping/Failing Out of Medical School

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ChrisPaul3

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Hi, I was wondering if anyone knew how many students drop out or fail out of medical school. I have to imagine there are people that get in and can't handle it, can anyone get me a percentage of students that graduate? Is this information available for individual schools?

Thanks!

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Hi, I was wondering if anyone knew how many students drop out or fail out of medical school. I have to imagine there are people that get in and can't handle it, can anyone get me a percentage of students that graduate? Is this information available for individual schools?

Thanks!

At most US Allopathic schools, the number is VERY low. Once you're into a school, administrators try hard not to lose you (it looks bad for the school to take great applicants and not be able to graduate them, and they lose the tuition since they can't accept another student mid-year).
You can remediate classes, or if things are really bad, repeat a year. I think the rule at my school is 3 years to finish the first two years of med school. From the class before me, only 2 out of ~160 remediated first year: one was due to health problems, the other told me he just didn't study at ALL first time around (he said he didn't know what the trigeminal nerve was by the end of anatomy.... REALLY bad sign), and both passed the second time around.
At least at my school, they try not to let students get to that point. There is so much help/tutoring/counseling available that it shouldn't be a problem. Professors actively look for problems. If you fail either of the first 2 anatomy tests, they put you in a special group that gets assigned a really knowledgeable TA who helps groups of 1-3 several times a week (basically runs through all the anatomy in the lab for them).
So far in my class (in second year now), we've only had one student drop out (and it was originally because he wanted to do an extra year of research and come back the following year... but he decided to stay out) and, I believe, one student repeat first year.
 
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At my State's Medical school some women in the MD program take a year off to have children, it was actually more common than I expected. One even took 8 years as she had 3 children during Med school, but she finished in the end. But also at my State's school the breakdown is like 65% women and 35% men for whatever reason. :confused:
 
I'm not sure how common failing and remediating the first year is.
I think 3-5 people had to remediate first year (out of 204). A few more had some flavor of "personal issues" that they had to deal with and took so much time off that they had to repeat first year.
 
Taking a leave of absence is a big negative for residencies? I mean, I can see having to repeat a year because of academics being a red flag, but if someone takes off due to illness/having kids/something not grade-related is it still a red flag?
 
We have 4 people in our 70ish person class that are repeating their 1st year...that seems like a lot.
 
Taking a leave of absence is a big negative for residencies? I mean, I can see having to repeat a year because of academics being a red flag, but if someone takes off due to illness/having kids/something not grade-related is it still a red flag?
Keep in mind Prowler was responding specifically to my question about those who had to remediate first year.
 
We've had a few have to repeat first year, and it's not uncommon to have leaves of absence for varying amounts of time (some take off for research, health problems...). No one has dropped out yet from my class, but we've picked up a few who dropped out after first year and came back a few years later (business took off for one of them).
 
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