This seems to be the reason at my school tbh.
Im asking about US med schools
Caribbean med school?
Drop-outs and people that had to repeat something.
Nope. But an IMG nonetheless
was LLU, they make you sign alcohol and tobacco pledge. Gotta take the good with the bad, dont want to play by the no alcohol rules, then choose a different school. Also they didnt go out looking for you but law gets involved and the hand is forced. The main point of my post was it seems like they bent over backwards to ensure everyone that wanted to graduate, did actually graduate. None of this 2 strikes and your out stuff the OP is talking about at their school
When everything's laid out and investigated, if there were truly 10 isolated events, that would reflect poorly on the school's disciplinary policy regardless of class size. That's a big if.
Are we talking block exams? If so, that is absurd. Imagine the pressure you put on a student if they fail an exam early in medical school. Each of the remaining 720ish days they're studying knowing if they fail another exam their medical career is effectively over? We then wonder why mental health is a factor...I don't believe this was an actual thing.
I should've been more clear, 2 failed blocks first year was an automatic dismissal. Block grades consisted solely of a 300 question MCQ test, 6 hour essay test split into 2 three hour blocks, and a clinical skills exam all during the last week of the block. If you failed 2 of the 3 exams or failed 1 exam and remediation it counted as a block failure and you had to repeat the block over the summer between first and second year. If you failed it again over the summer it was an automatic dismissal without appeal. You could only remediate if you failed 1 of the 3 exams and remediation occurred the week following exam week. Failure on the MCQ portion was <75%. If you scored between 70% - 74.4% remediation consisted of an oral exam with three faculty members in the 3 areas of your poorest performance. If you scored <70% you had to take a 150 question MCQ exam and failing was <80%. Failure of the essay exam, regardless of how badly you failed was an oral exam. Also, you could automatically fail the clinical skills exam if you didn't wash your hands at the beginning or end of the exam, but otherwise did fine. 1 of the people who dropped out got a 74% on the MCQ exam and forgot to wash his/her hands during the clinical skills exam, which consisted solely of an interview and no physical exam - so automatic block failure. She/he got really bad anxiety over possibly failing another block and being dismissed, so opted to dropped out over feeling so overwhelmed.
jesus this sounds like hell.
Believe It or Not, essay exams are better assessments than multichoice exams, because the latter can be at times exercises in pattern recognition.
Lol - that was basically the case with our exams. Case and point, the curriculum was set-up to cover normal anatomy, physiology, etc. first year with a smattering of pathophys here and there to illustrate concepts of normal physiology while pathology as a whole was second year. A disproportionate amount (~50%) of one of the essay exams first year focused on the pathophys and management of pre-eclampsia, so if you wrote off the one lecture we had on pre-eclampsia that block (out of ~80 total) because of how much it strayed from the rest of the curriculum and/or were in a weaker PBL/TBL group that block you were screwed. It also sucked that were done with all 3 exams by Wed of exam week and the MCQ and clinical skills exams were graded immediately after we finished, but had to wait until Friday afternoon or evening to get our block grade because it took forever for the essay exam to be graded.
I generally agree, but there can be a wide variety in the quality of essay questions. I remember some that were basically asking you to regurgitate a list or looking for specific buzzwords, so that even if you could explain the concept of what was being asked not providing those buzzwords resulted in loosing credit. Which also brings up the issue of greater subjectivity in grading with essay tests. So, while they have the potential to be better assessment tools I think there’s a much wider spectrum of quality and greater potential for them becoming less than ideal means of assessment.
Third year was much better because grades were based solely on shelf scores and preceptor evals. There had previously been a faculty written exam for FM, but thankfully they abandoned that for the NBME either my year or the year prior. My only beef with third year grades was that our grading scheme was H/P/F, no HP, and the shelf cutoff for honors was much higher than at many (most) other schools. By and large, attendings were fairly transparent with what they thought of you, and if anything, were maybe overly generous with their evals at times. Preceptor evals tended to only be an issue for students lacking common sense or social skills, and even if red flags were raised administration was receptive to personality conflicts and would look into what was said and not just take a bad eval as gospel.
Our school also has a large exam week each block. We have a 6 hour essay-based clinical reasoning exam where we get 3 cases with a history, physical, labs, imaging, and have to DDx each patient’s condition with support for our hypotheses. We also have an OSCE each block, alongside a 5 hour patient-centered exam. Finally, we end our week with an 8 hour clinical vignette MCQ exam over the entire block’s knowledge focusing on our PBL/TBL cases (self-taught with no supplemental material from faculty), lectures, anatomy, histology, embryo, pharm, micro, etc.
Sounds like someone lives in Cleveland 😉
Reading posts in the resident's forum taught me that!
How come cheating as a pre med is a huge red flag that will take years to overcome, but a med student gets away with it?
Great question! I should use this in interviews.
🙂
I couldn’t agree with this more strongly. And also couldn’t be more glad that it’s not a thing.
Oh God the thought of essay exams in med school makes me wanna throw up I hated essay tests in college. The blanks sheet of paper just gives me anxiety. In college there was less material and studying it thoroughly enough so you could be ready for essay exams was more doable.
It could always be worse...one of the philosophy professors at my undergrad who taught Advanced Logic only used 250 question T/F tests. That was an absolute mind ****.
Is this statement true or false though?
Good question.
don't answer the question and you'll get 100%
The same can technically be true of MCQs. Trying to distill a disease process to a single question is a remarkably difficult task, so either the question writer make it easier on themselves which allow students to better guess at the correct answer even if they don't know the material, or the question writer develops a good question, but the distractors could also be correct answers, which leads to student challenges. It takes a lot of work to write a very good question in which neither of those is the case. And then you're still only testing one teaching point, which may not represent the student's overall level of knowledge of that subject.
This is why I"m for multiple choice questions- the ones we have aren't easy, there are "trap" answers, but it makes it easier to determine who actually got the correct answer ( so better than essay questions) but def. not something you can just " guess algorithms" on. I've always been good at MCQ questions, but the ones in med school really do test understanding. If boards are mostly MCQ, ( referring to lvl 1 and Step 1) , why shouldn't pre clinical exams be MCQs?
UIW uses essay questions, I beleive.
Maybe they all conspired an insurrectionist rebellion.
Depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to learn the style for boards, then MCQs are great. If your goal is to actually promote learning, then MCQs aren't ideal because you can't get a comprehensive assessment of someone's knowledge about a disease process.
