Should just clarify that I'm at Sinai so my experiences may not reflect other med schools but I imagine it to be relatively similar in other P/F schools. Thank you guys for your questions! I hope I was able to answer the as succinctly as possible. Good luck to those who are in the current application cycle.
I hope you did well!
You said med school is hard. How hard is "med school hard" compared to "undergraduate hard"?
How have you needed to adapt, so far, to deal with the curriculum demands?
Thanks!
Thanks, I think I did well but since I don't know the class average yet I can't really say for sure. But, I definitely scored more than enough to pass. Med school is hard because of the volume of information you need to learn in the short amount of time. I can't really equate how much material was taught in one month of med school to undergrad bio class. I'll give you some numbers tho. In one month, we had 33 lectures , each lecture averages ~50-60 slides of material (most are image slides) and take about 50 minutes, and 16 labs (Anatomy + Histology). The labs are killer, especially anatomy because there's so much information that is presented in lab and you don't really know what to remember and what to skip. There's a lot of self-directed learning. You can't say "okay so then I'm going to know everything for the midterm" Knowing everything will take you longer than you think and plus some information is not worth knowing at this stage of the curriculum. Most professors let us know which information we need to know and what we can totally ignore. This especially helpful for Embryology, which everyone seems to dislike. lol.
But with that being said, I've taken some engineering courses in undergrad that would literally cover only 6 chapters in the entire semester and I would struggle so much because they were applied science to the extreme. Most of the material we are learning now in med school is easy enough to understand but difficult to memorize over a short period of time. I have to say how the human body works is very complex and we are just being presented it in a very simple manner for now anyway. I imagine physiology will further elaborate on such complexity.
Congratulations on your first test.
Do you attend a P/F school? If so, where is the cutoff for passing (I'm assuming 70).
Yep, I do. Cutoff is 70 or two standard deviations below the mean, whichever is lower. Usually, the cutoff is the two STDs. In the current course I'm taking we can't fail both the midterm and final. We have to pass at least one regardless of what our overall grade is at the end.
Do P/F schools keep percent scores for ranking purposes, or do they simply not rank?
Also by midterm do you mean set of midterms for all classes? How many hours did you study total for them?
Sinai is an unranked P/F school. Your grades are seen by the least number of people possible. At the end of each course, your transcript will say Pass or Fail and that is all residency programs will ever see. Sinai does keep some internal information that is only shared again with the fewest number of people possible. For example, after each exam, students that performed in the bottom 5% will received what's called a "marginal pass". This does not appear on the transcript but it is simply an indicator for the student. The student's adviser will reach out to them just to check up and see how things are going. Usually, marginal pass is nothing to get worked up about. An exam can have an average of 95 and bottom 5% could be an 85. Sometimes you may have had a bad day.
By midterm, I had a single midterm, 100 multiple choice questions with 3-hour time limit. Exams are taken online and they open Friday at 4pm and remain open until Monday at 8am. We follow Sinai's honor code for the exams. Once you open the exam, you have 3 hours to finish it. My midterm covered a month's worth of material, which included Gross Anatomy, Embryology, and Histology. It's funny because before starting med school I would hear people say students study for like 8-12 hours a day, and I think the max I ever studied in a super productive day was probably 8 hours, which was probably for the MCAT. So, I didn't know if I could study that long in med school. But, 8-12 hrs became the norm mainly because in the beginning I was taking it a little easier than I should have but I was also acclimating to this new learning environment. It took a while to figure out how to study and I can only say after taking the midterm with some confidence that I think I know how to study to do well. So total hours, would be 240 hours outside of class studying in one month's time or 6-8hrs/day. But, I think because I'm enjoying what I'm studying time literally flies by for certain topics.
was the first midterm as bad as you expected? was it similar to college or a whole different level?
It was fair. I was weak in Embryology and most people feel the same way. It's really hard to equate to college since it's been a while since I took a bio course but just estimating I would say the midterm covered about a year's worth of undergrad Bio and that's just off the top of my head. And I mention Bio because I think Bio courses throw the most amount of information at you similar to med school courses.
I don't know if he was claiming that. I think it's just advice.
Yeah, I should have been clearer. I meant if you are taking a gap year and you have the opportunity to do something once in a lifetime then do it. There are many more opportunities in med school that actually can get overwhelming but they are for the most part related to medicine. So if there's something totally un-related to medicine I'd say go for it. For example, during my gap year I started a start-up business with a few colleagues which is now continuing to grow under their management. I can't be involved as much as I was before but I'm glad it's something I got to do. I'm sure businesses can be started while in med school to but it's just harder. There are some students who seem to be able to do w/e they want and still perform at the top of their class. I don't think I'm capable of that but I'm perfectly happy with where I am now and my potential.
Awesome to see you with "Medical Student" under your tag.
Thank you! It was hard to believe at first especially during the first week of classes. But, each day I feel so blessed and I know I'm in a privileged position.
