How Bad is a partial pass?

[cakeofdeath]

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Hello all I'm a second year medical student at an MD school. Recently I was absent to one of my tests (slept in, had back to back tests) and they might not let me retake it. This would result in me doing some remediation over the summer and then moving on to third year. My school is a pass fail school and it would label the following as partial conpetency: pass on my academic recors. How bad is this in terms of residency applications? I have not taken step yet I'm studying right now but I feel like I ruined my career and chances of being able to get into a EM program and am considering switching my interests to psych at this time. Thoughts and feedback from others would be helpful. Kind regards.

 

[siliso]

You didn’t ruin your life, possibly some additional challenge that you’d need to make up for in other ways like being awesome clinically and doing well on boards. But having reviewed applications (to IM not EM but at an academic center) not a major ping at all in the way that a step or clinical failure would be.

 

[NeurologyHopeful2018]

Hello all I'm a second year medical student at an MD school. Recently I was absent to one of my tests (slept in, had back to back tests) and they might not let me retake it. This would result in me doing some remediation over the summer and then moving on to third year. My school is a pass fail school and it would label the following as partial conpetency: pass on my academic recors. How bad is this in terms of residency applications? I have not taken step yet I'm studying right now but I feel like I ruined my career and chances of being able to get into a EM program and am considering switching my interests to psych at this time. Thoughts and feedback from others would be helpful. Kind regards.

Psych is on par with EM in terms of competitiveness.

Your low pass is only a minor red flag as preclinical grades are of least concern to PDs.

 

[operaman]

As noted above, it will all depend on how the rest of your application looks. If (big IF) this is an isolated event, then no it may not even be noticed and at most might generate an interview question which you would easily answer as a lapse in responsibility that you corrected and clearly never had an issue with ever again.

The flip side is that you now have a blemish on your record and IF (big IF) you have some additional trouble - maybe you're late to rounds a couple times and this gets noted, or you have some other minor issues that would otherwise go unnoticed. In that case, now it becomes a history of problems that plagued you throughout medical school. If that happens, it will absolutely hurt you in any field because no PD (and no fellow resident) wants to deal with that s--t.

I say that not to scare you but to make sure you are painfully aware of how important it is you don't have any more trouble. This means all those modules and evals and essays and whatever other annoying add on work that people often slip up on forget about are things you just have to be perfect about. Clinically you just have to be good and you have less room for screwing up things like attendance or tardiness. If you're hyper aware of this and keep your nose clean from here on out and have an otherwise solid app, you'll do just fine.

 

[cakeofdeath]

Thank you all who responded, I do feel much better about my situation. I will definitely do my very best to give a lot more attention to the redundant busy work that we are handed out as you so mentioned operaman.

I was incredibly stressed about my situation, the most I have been since I entered medical school by a long shot. I seriously appreciate everyone's input, I can finally focus on studying for boards now.