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How long has it been since you were in medical school? I can guarantee you that at the two medical schools I have information about, the 10-20% of students actually going to lecture figure rings true.
Also, plenty of people who skip lectures actually have discipline, get their work done, and end up doing very well. Like you said, there is no "one size fits all game plan". I wake up at 10-11 am, and watch at 2x. By the time everyone else is done with lectures and eating their lunch at 12:30, I've finished them as well from home. Then I can stay up late and study when I'm most naturally inclined to (~midnight-2am).
More than a few of my classmates who wanted to improve their grades at the end of first year started going to lectures again at the start of a new block, then stopped when they realized it was hurting them more than helping them.
Not sure why I'm responding really, as I really agree with your last paragraph. I guess your post just sounds a little too much like our administrators/block directors who, despite having podcasting/streaming available like to try to guilt trip us into going to class by implying that not going to class makes you a worse/less dedicated to medicine student. I'm just tired of hearing it, because it is patently untrue.
The people who don't attend classes aren't usually the ones who actually know how many people are there when they aren't. There was absurd exaggeration of how many skipped class even when I was in med school, and before. I suspect that's thats going on on this thread too. When I was in med school people say "like 90% don't come to class" and yet half the class did religiously attend, was just a few people who didn't attend pretending everyone else didn't as well.
If you have the discipline to study on your own, great.then you should study on your own. But again most people who say they do don't. More then a Few people getting up late, exercising, doing errands, pursing around and showing up sheepishly to the library a few hours later than their classmates, having yet to preview the material once. For some the freedom isn't a benefit. For many it sounds great but they are Often their own worse enemy to succeeding. I promise you not all of your classmates benefit. Certainly not all of my classmates did. I know many who started studying later than those of us who attended class, already one pass through the material behind. They did poorly and after a few classes were back in class, having failed their experiment, Again, if it works for you, great.
But a lot of time the proponents for not attending class screw over their classmates by saying "nobody attends class anymore" and that nobody should and then a healthy chunk who listen to them end up doing poorly. There is a lot of "peer pressure" in med school that you should do this or not do that by people who refuse to accept that in fact there are many approaches to med school and that the one that works best for one person can actually be the worst approach for everyone else. This is a perfect example of something that's not a good idea for everyone. and yet on SDN for over a decade people have created threads saying "nobody attends class" and "nobody should." No, I don't think times have changed. You can search for threads going back to before I went to med school with the identical debate. The streaming technology is a little better but the underlying facts haven't changed, nor has human nature. If anything the number of distractions the typical med student has to deal with outside of lecture are now greater than ever before.
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