This might come off sounding awkward, but does PBL feel like you are just paying somebody to home school yourself.
Actually...not at all. Have you gotten an interview invite yet? If/when you go on your interview, you will probably sit in on a PBL session and get to experience for yourself. Until then, it's a little difficult to describe, but I'll give it a shot...
Imagine that you are in BFD somewhere and there is this poor person with some medical condition that needs your help. You have no medical knowledge to speak of, but at least you're a pre-med (or med student)...and that is better than nothing.
Fortunately for you (and the patient), you have the same superpower as Hiro from the hit TV show Heroes, and you can make time move very slowly, or even stop.
So...you ask the patient questions. They tell you things and you write them down. Once you've asked everything you can think of, you stop time and go grab some medical textbooks that happen to have been nearby and look up every single thing the patient told you, how it works, how it relates to their current condition, etc.
Then, you have some more info, so you start time again, and ask some more questions...or maybe do a blood test (which you learned how to do in your lab book...lol...just play along, its not a perfect analogy).
You get the results back, but you don't have a clue what the "Specific Gravity" of a "Urinalysis" is. So...you stop time again, and go look it all up all over again.
I find the facilitators to be VERY helpful. They don't "teach" you things, per se...(there's nothing you can't find in your books anyways) but they keep you on the right track and redirect you if you get too far gone or if you're wasting too much time. I imagine this activity will be less needed as we get better at the process and learn more basics.
Anyways, once you figure out what the patient has, how it works, what the treatment is, etc. you send them on their way and start the process all over again.
The cases/patients are VERY well designed to teach you ALL of the basic science you need to learn during the first 2 years of med school. Each case is VERY dense with tons of things to learn.
Aside from basic science "board" type stuff, you also get TONS of practice reviewing lab results, interviewing "patients", doing SOAP notes, and appplying what you're learning to real world situations...all of which are said to be helpful for real world rotations.
Anyways, that's my kinda messed up take on it. It's actually much more complex than that, but maybe that gives you an idea. If not, let me know and I'll give a less "metaphoric" take on it.
If not, why just not reply yet? I'm totally confused. 
