Can a current student tell me how much SDL/PBL stuff is in the curriculum? I know that you meet in small groups after block exams to go over them. Thanks!
one semester down, and i can tell you:
no PBL to date, none anticipated. you are assigned pretty much the same small group for two classes that utilize groupwork, but it's not graded. our basic sciences course has 3 case studies/quizzes worth 12% of our grade in total, and they varied in difficulty level; the breakdown was 1% for an individual quiz, 1% for a group quiz, and 2% for a group assignment done over 2hrs PER case study. there was also a peer eval grade, so for this course groupwork did factor almost as much as an exam towards your grade, i.e. don't yell at anyone in your group, it'll come back to bite you
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small groups of 11 students meet after each exam to essentially take the exam over as a group; it's part of the admin's ongoing eval of the curriculum, since we're still working out kinks, and it supposedly has something to do with an algorithm that tells the profs which exam questions should be tossed. you get something like 2% grade bump for attending, -5% taken off for skipping.
OPP obviously requires partners - but it rotates every week.
anatomy lab - you're with a group of 40 students who have to share the lab at one time, 2 scheduled hrs a week.
there were two graded standardized patient encounters - obviously not lectures. i'd say i spent about 10hrs prepping/practicing for each of those, fyi.
other than that, it's lectures. first semester we were generally in lecture from 7:30 or 8:30am til 11:30, and labs/group sessions were in the afternoon. the next three semesters look to be almost exclusively lectures - anywhere between 5-8 hrs a day (!).
this might have been a little more detail than you were looking for... but hopefully it helps!
good luck to anyone interviewing in the next few weeks - i had mine in feb, and got in a week later! definitely not too late in the game
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