important consideration in choosing schools

[timurx]

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I've been hearing a LOT about this lately, but how important of a factor is choosing a med school based on a PASS/FAIL system? My current top choice is NOT pass fail, but I have been accepted to one that is PASS/FAIL and I'm starting to think that it would be considerably less stressful to just have to worry about passing as opposed to grades...

I'm particularly interested in hearing current med students on this one, both students of a pass/fail and regular grading system.

 

[PeepshowJohnny]

The only thing I'd be aware of is that pass/fail doesn't always MEAN pass fail.

There are some school out there that are TRUE pass fail preclinically. It's a completely binary 0 or a 1 for fail and pass. They rank students based on clinical performance. The guy who missed 3 questions all year in anatomy and the guy 1 point about pass level get the same grade and there is no difference recorded.

However, there are also a lot of schools out there that say they're pass/fail but don't tell you that they're behind the scenes tabulating a cummulative to use to rank students. So in this example, the above students would recieve the same grade on the transcript, but the genius may be ranked #1 in his class (or sometime's more vaquely as in the top %) while the barely passer's transcript may show him in the bottom 10% or something. Unfortunately, sometimes students assume they're in the previous type of school and are really in one of the "secret ranking" ones.

 

[PlayMeSomeMusic]

Is it just pass/fail or is it high pass/pass/below pass/fail which essentially is a/b/c/f

 

[45408]

Pass/fail would be nice, but at nearly every school, you'll know what percentage you got, and you'll know the class average. My school is honors/high pass/pass/low pass/fail, which wasn't what I would have liked, but I don't think it really makes that much of a difference.