I don't like Fatima. This school really kicks up turd. If I had to do it all over again, I definitely would not have chosen Fatima. St. Luke's would definitely have been a better fit, at least for me. But I'll try not to be so biased. Here are my two cents worth:
Pros: relatively cheap compared to other schools, excellent Philipino board preparation classes, new medical building, fairly respectable faculty, large number of fil-ams and foreigners. Listed in WHO and that ECFMG list. Strong academic scholarship program for the truly gifted and highly motivated.
Cons: an inefficient, indifferent administration. No effective student-teacher-administration feedback. This school is effectively run by decree. Turmoil in the administration since the patron, Dr. Santos, has passed away. Teaching is not geared for the USMLE. located on the outskirts of Metro Manila with HEAVY traffic. Majority of students are of questionable ability. Hospital wards are pathetic learning experiences because the patients are few. All the classes are arbitrarily run. Exams are frequently not tied to lecture materials or textbook facts. Teachers are frequently very late to classes and a lot don't seem to care about teaching.
A lot of the cons are applicable to many schools in the philippines, and not just fatima.
With regards to the scandal, i'd like to throw in my opinion. According to my teachers (so do take this with a shake of salt), the "Incident" occured in 1991 when the top twenty testtakers in the philippine national medical board exam hailed from Fatima. This was unprecedented. No school had ever dominated the national rankings that much. Naturally, the established medical schools cried, "FOUL", and started this controversy that got onto the front page of all the newspapers. At one point, the fatima students in question agreed to sit for the exam again to try to prove that they had not cheated (ie brought notes into class or communicated incognito with each other). This was also unprecedented to require students to retake the boards. Nonetheless, the scores on the second sitting was congruent to the first, in order from number one to number twenty. So what gives?
Allegedly, the board exam in 1991 turned out to be a direct carbon copy, word for word, of the exam in 1985. The Department of Health had apparently been too lazy to re-write the exam. If there should have been a villain, it should have been the pencilpushing medico-bureaucrats. At the time, the DOH released all the exams after each year, just like the NBME used to. However, since the incident, the prior exam questions have not been released anymore.
All the medical schools in Manila had access to the old exams prior to 1991. Whether or not their students studied the old exams is another thing. At Fatima, the teachers made a point of hammering the old sample questions into the students. Memorizing several thousand multiple choice questions from a decade's worth of board exams is not a light undertaking. Believe me, all those questions start merging into each other after the first few hundred items. The top twenty students on the boards also happened to be the top twenty students in the school by rank. So I believe it was because that they worked really hard to achieve the score that they did.
Now, the issue of whether studying old exams in order to succeed in medical boards is truly an effective way producing competency in future medical doctors is moot. Even US students study old exam questions for the USMLE. The board scores are the primary determinant in what residency programs you can get into.
The reason why the other schools were so annoyed was that the ranking of schools was based on the number of topnotchers that the school had. So for 1991, Fatima was the number one medical school in all of the Philippines. The establishment was not pleased. Since then, the formula for the ranking of schools has been changed so that it is the average of the students' board exams that counts. Now, UP Diliman and UST need not ever worry again about their rankings cuz all their crappy students who fail out of their classes transfer to Fatima and thus boost their average.
That's what I hate most out of all the criticism laid on Fatima: that students who failed from other schools, that students who couldn't handle the other schools, they all transferred to Fatima, the crappy school for all underachieving medical students. Fatima used to be the only school that accepted transfer students. UP and UST wouldn't accept a transfer even if he was to be a future Nobel prizewinner. The other schools were so draconian in the way they treat their students who were having a hard time. If you fail, you're out. there is no reprieve. American medical schools would never do that; rather, they would provide one-on-one tutoring and mentoring to make sure that you get over whatever difficulties you were having. What's amazing about Fatima is that they take these so-called failing students and put them through all the way so that they pass the board exams and finish their medical education. It's not easy to take a so-called failure and turn him/her into a success. But that's just my opinion and I'm a liberal Republican.
ok, sorry for the long message.
) and I am planning to go to the philippines in July to check out some schools. My family is mainly from Cebu so I will be checking out CIM (Velez) and Cebu Doc. I won't be applying until next year because I have to finish my research here. I wanted to know if anyone had any feedback from these schools or any schools in Cebu. Thanks!
