I totally agree with Briansle (what's up buddy). I'm a 1st year at USC, and I believe PBL can be extremely rewarding if you take advantage of it. By "taking advantage" I mean reading everything you are told to read by your group members, making sure you understand how the material interrelates with other material, and most importantly, being motivated to learn. USC is not a fluff school by any means, and if you do what you are suppose to be doing you will learn A LOT -- guaranteed.
Now, we have some lectures here, but we are suppose to call them "resource sessions." We have a Dental Anatomy and Morphology lecture and every two weeks we have a lecture for the case we just finished. This lecture is a time in which we can ask questions and see how everything fits together. Now, you may be asking yourself, how in the hell do they expect me to pay 90k +/year to do the work myself? Listen, and I can speak from experience, sitting in lecture from 8am to 5pm is not doing you any good. You are still going to have to go home and "RE-LEARN" everything you just sat through. If you deny this, you are one of the few individuals in this world that can see something once and know it. However, sitting in case (which is only 3hrs/day 3x week) allows you to act more like a clinician from the get-go. It will allow you to see how various disciplines (physio, biochem, anatomy) work in harmony (most of the time) to keep this marvelous thing we call the human body running. But, you are not going to learn everything you need to know for the Part-1 boards from some case 3x week, you will still need to go home and go over the information using the books recommended to you by upper classmen as well as the school (only PBL gives you much more time to do this).
Now you are probably thinking, where do the cases come in? The cases are designed (and well-designed) to make sure you cover a certain system or multiple systems (the heart, GI tract) during each case. You WILL cover anatomy, physiology, histology, pathology, biochemistry, and pharmacology in each case. For example, you will do a case involving an infant and a heart condition, which will require you to learn everything involving the heart (physio, anatomy, biochemistry, pathology). Then the case will introduce an infection from a dental procedure and the medications prescribed to treat this infection (endocarditis???), which will then force you to look into some pharmacology as well as clinical microbiology and so on until the case closes.
So in the end, you will get your money's worth, but ONLY if you take advantage of the time provided to you by the school. Also, the free time allows you to take on additional tasks like getting involved with school government, organized dentistry leadership positions (ADA, ASDA, ADEA & GPSS). For me, I use my free time to read textbooks that relate to the case, and volunteer in the OMFS department. Also, this school offers a lot of extra things you can get involved with. There is a sports dentistry selective, an I.V. sedation selective, numerous opportunities to get involved with aesthetics, implants and so on. There is an open-door policy with every department and upper-classmen are extremely accommodating if you have the desire to help out with a surgery case, perio case, endo case, implant case, aesthetic case and so on.
There are people that will start a PBL program, at USC or some where else, and hate it. I mean absolutely hate it. Why? It is a very unorthodox way of learning (think about it, you've been sitting through lecture for 21+ years) and you really have to TRUST the system and believe that with the cases and YOUR OWN EFFORT you will be extremely successful. Some of these individuals that hate PBL want everything spoon fed to them and others need the structure of a traditional curriculum. Some individuals want to know that they need to JUST read the powerpoint from each course, memorize it and this will ensure them of an A in each course. This is not how USC works. No one tells you what will be on each midterm and final, but then again, grades don't really matter because there is NO RANKING SYSTEM here. So, essentially, your GPA becomes moot because it has NO MEANING behind it.
I honestly believe that the individual EARNS the board score. It honestly does not matter where you go. People earn 75's and 99's at USC and every other school in this country. If YOU have the will power to specialize, then sac up and start studying. If not, pass Part-1 and move on.
I cannot stress this enough. You will only get the most out of your education at USC if you take advantage of everything it has to offer. But, no one is going to tell you to do it. They are going to tell you to go to case 3x week, Dental Anatomy/Morphology lecture once/wk and Morphology lab once/week.