Honor threshold incredibly high at my school

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SpikesnSpookes

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Anyone else find it very difficult to honor core rotations at your medical school? I've been one of the top scorers on the shelf exams and so far have yet to honor a rotation (and I know my classmates have found it extremely hard to honor as well). I was wondering if anyone has gone through anything similar and how this will affect applying to residency programs when you haven't honored much during 3rd year.

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Speaking with residents, they echoed this during their MS3 year at their schools. It seemed common knowledge that achieving honors during the 3rd was extremely rare. From their perspective as current PG-2 and PG-3's, in hindsight they now understood that they didn't have the clinical skills to earn honors despite the fact that they knew they did a good job. Then they added that they would really like to give us (current MS3 honors), but again they couldn't honestly do it because we don't have the skills yet. Lastly, they added that 4th year was the time to expect honor grades.

I see their perspective, but I hole heartily disagree because I think they should be able to manage their expectations for what a MS3 is capable of. Yes we don't have the clinical skills yet, but we're not supposed to. We're supposed to be adaptable, eager to learn, and show aptitude in the basic medical knowledge we gained during the first two years.

On the bright side, I can't imagine a residency program not being aware of certain schools "handing out honors" and other not. These committees have seen their fare share of candidates and can read between the lines most likely. But that's just my impression, I have no evidence of this. However, again, anyone who has been doing this for awhile just develops a sense of what an honors student from SOM X looks like vs an A student from SOM Y.

Curious to hear what others have to say about the topic.


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Depending on what you go into, it may or may not matter. I think it is an option for some programs to screen apps based on Honoring rotations, but outside of that, if someone truly views your application and you got good evals and good shelf scores, you'll still be seen as a good applicant. Typically with the MSPE comes a breakdown (at least at my school and several places I've heard of) of how many students honor each core rotation. So if you don't honor your rotation, but only 3% of your class does, then it speaks to the fact that it may be difficult to honor a rotation at your program. Likewise, if you honor a rotation, but your school says that 40% of students honored that rotation, it isn't impressive at all.
 
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Anyone else find it very difficult to honor core rotations at your medical school? I've been one of the top scorers on the shelf exams and so far have yet to honor a rotation (and I know my classmates have found it extremely hard to honor as well). I was wondering if anyone has gone through anything similar and how this will affect applying to residency programs when you haven't honored much during 3rd year.
No one really cares. Honors means very little unless you are going into a highly competitive specialty, and even then they probably only really care if you honored in that specialty. This is especially true since at some schools honors is basically given to everyone who passes, while at others less than 10% of the students receive honors. Passing everything, your board scores, and good LORs for your chosen specialty are the only really important aspects you need to worry about. Research too if you are going into a field that highly values research in applicants. Other than that, just relax and try to do your best while learning as much as you can.
 
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From my limited knowledge, the first screen is usually the USMLE score

Talk with others but it seems better use of time to knock that out of the park rather than work on whether Dr Smith likes his coffee with cream or not
 
Yes it has felt difficult to get them

I believe at my school around 10-20% of the M3 students typically get honors for a given clerkship

thankfully my school no longer (directly) considers eval grades from residents, although it wouldn't have been an issue for me so far. I feel like the residents are usually more lenient than the attendings anyway
 
Honors is about 10% at my school. What's even worse is that the next 15% is the "High Pass" and then 75% get the "Pass". It isn't uncommon for most of the students here to go the entire third year without anything other than the "Pass".
 
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