ok, sorry for the delay...
Pro's about LECOM
They are an accredited medical school
You can get your medical degree from them
They do their best to accomodate the students
They are one of the largest medical schools in the country
Ok, so now about the other issues about lecom. going back to first year, a lot of schools offer a much longer anatomy course, LECOM has prosection (and this year they had a partial prosection that actually took a lot of the grunt work out, but still let the first years dissect a bit- which i thought was a good learning tool) The reason that LECOM does this is to offer a basic science course that a lot of school don't in order to better prepare for the boards. The more repitition the better. The downside of this basic science course, called CORE (for core sciences) is that sometimes pharmacology or the other subject might only have 1-2 lecture hours, which means that your entire phramacology grade is based on 5-10 questions (up to 5 for every lecture hour). Granted that there are 4-6 CORE exams, but if you have a hard time shifting, then you will have a hard time bringing your grades back up.
Although i do like the concept of CORE, it is the execution that bothers me the most. At LECOM, we are told that Physiology, Pharmacology, and Pathology are some of the most important subjects. Yet, Pharm and Physiology have some of the worst lecturers.
Physio:
One of the teachers, Dr. A, is fantastic when you are with him in a small group or one on one. however, when he is lecturing in front of 100-150 people, he stutters and stammers so much that it makes it excrutiating and very hard to follow an already difficult subject. Not to mention the fact that his powerpoints often have errors in them. Dr. A is extremely dedicated and comes in at night, and on the weekends when requested by the students. It is my opinion that if he didn't screw up so much in class, he wouldn't have to put in extra time.
another proffessor, Dr. B speaks in an extremely monotone voice and reads off of the slides, as you can tell his lectures are wonderful to sit through.
A third prof , Dr. C lectures from PDF's, go to class and read the pdf's and you will be fine.
The fourth prof , Dr. D is the best one that they have at LECOM. a little dry, but her powerpoints are made so simple and she explains the concepts so well that you feel like you know the material walking out of the classroom.
The issue is that the majority of the lectures are done through Dr. A and B because they have been there the longest, and Dr's C and D barely lecture to us at all. Even though the student evalualtions have constantly stated that we prefer Dr. C and D, no real changes to the curriculum have been made.
Pharm:
We have three prof's who do the majority of the teaching.
Prof A - is a prof who drags lectures on. what i mean by this is that he takes 3 hours to cover what anyone else could in an hour. he is extremely boring and every time i sit through his lecture (i have never missed class) i wonder why i stay. does most of the lectures for frist year (7/8)
Prof B - warm, engaging man. Lectures are informative and you feel like you really learn the key concepts. rarely does laectue during first year.
Other issues that i have with first year and this year:
the clinicians!
although it is nice to get some real world experience from practicing clinicians, it just seems like some of them have no idea where we are in terms of the material, or they will often contradict info that the pHD's have told us.
There is not format for the lectures most of the time, if the clinician wants to do a powerpoint, then you are lucky, if they want to do projector slides, then you have to hope that you can copy everything down in time.
Sometimes the clinicians will go over items or disease that you have already heard 3-4 times, but they will have their own minute piece of information that contradicts what the PHD's have said so you have to 'relearn' the disease. while this is a positive thing for tests (being tested on diseases you have already covered) I want to learn medicine, not have 5 lectures on malaria.
All that aside, the real beef that i have is with the powers that be. As a second year preparing for boards, i want to know my chances and have a realistic outlook. And we were told at the begining of the year that if we didnt have a 3.0 the statistics showed that we had a 50/50 chance of passing the boards. Ok, that's fine. but over the following weeks, this point was repeated so many times that it became the battle cry of the administration and instead of being a motivating factor, was used as an anal cattle prod for instilling fear in us. LECOM has adopted the method of scare, demoralize, and demean. Every boards meeting we have we are told that we don't study enough, that our performance on the tests are below average, and, "you guys don't have a chance of passing boards if you keep on getting scores like this", or, "I am ashamed of this class".
It has gotten people so paranoid that this weekend we had a diagnostic test, just to see where people are, and people are so paranoid that they bought copies of the diagnostic test for $150-200!!! FOR A DIAGNOSTIC TEST!!! do you want to know the reason why? because we were told from the new dean of LDP that if we scored badly on this diagnostic, then we would be "heavily advised" from taking the boards until later on. in fact LECOM would even do us the favor of taking us off our rotations until we took the boards, just so we would have more time to study. (which means that we woulnd't be able to walk for graduation, or that we would be delayed graduating by up to a year, a year in which we would have to fund ourselves) This is completely condtradictory to the stats that we were shown that stated that the longer you took to take your boards, the worse the averages were! I am no means a bleeding heart liberal who thinks that people should be made to feel warm and fuzzy about themselves. If you screw up, face the consequences, be an adult about it. But if all you do to motivate people is try and instill fear in them, it wears out really quick. If you kick your dog once, he will come back to your side, but if you kick your dog every day, every chance you get, your dog will lose his trust in you and will avoid you at any cost. right now i feel like i cannot trust LECOM to prepare for the boards, i have to suck it up, and study on my own and get the job done (with the kaplan tapes!
)
Basically the outlook of the school for boards is to use a master-slave mentality, whip them until they get it right. There is no positive feedback, no "hey guys, just keep on working harder and you will get it done", it's always, "why aren't you studying more!"
One of the deans often has classes where she assigns a journal article and we have to read it and take a quiz on it. Well this past week the questions were so abstract and completely based on semantics, and most people only got a 4/8 on it. When she found this out, she was furious and said, "I can't beleive that you all did so poorly on this, these are board style questions, if you can't do these, you will all fail miserably come july." But the simple fact remains, if out of 150 people, 89 get a 4/8, doesn't that mean something about the test and not the students?
This is the general theme for most of the tests at LECOM. we have come to expect mediocrity if not a complete lack of preparation for the test questions. There have been some tests in Heme/Onc where there were 7-10 repeated questions. Not a big deal? try making that 7-10 repeated twice = 14-20 questions out of a 75 question test.
There have also been tests where the correct answer is not present as well as absolutely horrbly written questions. there have been so many questions dropped from tests over the past semster that the average that LECOM would get if they wre graded on their tests is a 80%!! (if there was a70 question test and you dropped 9 questions and counted those as "wrong" choices). I am glad that LECOM does run statistics on their exam questions and drops ones that are low.
CODA: this is the clinicial course of LECOM. There is so much frustration with this that it could be a seperate post in itself. whenever you guys come to interview at the school, as the student ambassadors about CODA and watch their faces, you know what you will see? contained restraint. ask about the CODA manual and look at what you see. Did you know that for the
two years of OMM we spend 200 hours practicing manipulation? pretty cool eh?
well, just for
this semsester of CODA, we are spending 140 hours of it doing CODA!! you know what? 1/2 of it is complete BS and busywork!! 70 hours of my life where i could be studying for tests, or studying for the boards, spent doing paperwork!
Ultimately, the questions remains, would i come to this school again? The answer is unfortunately, No. At this point, i am just going to put my head down, forge ahead, and just get my degree and get the hell out of Erie. Medical school is not a place where i learn the art of medicine and learn how to deal with patients compassionately. It has unfortunetely degraded into a mutually parastic relationship. I am using the school to get my medical degree, and they are using me for my tuition money (which by the way they are using to make a $6 million dollar purchase of "columns" (
http://www.ajuel.com/Lecom_Marble_Column_Designs.htm). I know that LECOM is one of the cheapest schools in the country, but unfortunately, i am getting what a paid for.
am i aware of discontent at other schools? yes, i understand that the poop is going to stink no matter which toilet you crap in, but there seems to be an awful lot of crap at LECOM. I understand that the school is trying to do it's best, but it's like trying to geta one armed man to clap, there is no way it's going to happen unless he gets a prosthesis. That's the biggest obstacle with my school. They have all these teacher evaluations and course evaluations and student governemnt boards, but they don't really apply the feedback that they recieve.
that's my two cents, i wasn't trying to bash my school, i was just laying out the facts so that poeple could have a good view of the real workings of LECOM, adn the frustrations that the students face here. I hope this helps to put (somewhat) of an objective viewpoint out there.
ps- and yes, i am glad i am in medical school i would rather be training to become a doctor, even with the frustrations of LECOM, than be doing anything else.
