Mandatory attendance for MS1 and MS2 to protect schools from malpractice

[Old Grunt]

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Hey guys. My medical school. Touro-COM, is probably going to institute a mandatory attendance policy, in which students will be required to attend at least 70% of classes and 95% of labs. One reason that they give is that in medical malpractice lawyers are now also going after medical schools to see if the doc in question ever went to classes. If the school can't show records that they did, they are now being made to share in the liability for issuing a degree to a noncompetent physician. This is despite USMLE / COMLEX exams stating that a the physician is competent to the level of their training.

I am calling B.S. on this. Passing boards is the nationalized standard for demonstrating professional competency. Additionally, before anyone can practice, they have to go through residency and again prove a degree of competence.

I'd love to see some supporting evidence to support this wild eyed claim. As it stands, it sounds like your school just wants to mandate an attendance policy, knew it would be unpopular, and hid behind the typical "evil medical malpractice lawyer" boogyman.

If there isn't any truth to this, the larger question is, why would an institution fib to its students? Speaking of professionalism.......

Just as an aside, in order to be accredited by the American Bar Association, law schools are required to have an attendance policy and where students are required to be present in class at least 80% of the time.

That's because Law School utilizes the Socratic method to teach. Class attendance and participation is crucial to learning how to be a lawyer, just as clinical rotations are crucial to learning how to be a doctor.

As for lectures, different schools utilize different styles, be it PBL, didactic, etc.

 

[Old Grunt]

After a few weeks (maybe even days,) you'll change your tune as you realize that Basic Science Education in Medical School is almost an afterthought to the [non-clinical] faculty who generally dominate the teaching.

The most experienced/knowledgeable PhDs seem frustrated that medical education only scrapes the surface of the topic that they have devoted their whole life to researching, and they get 1 hour to present everything to the class. More often, the newest faculty member(s) in the department will get "stuck" with the teaching -- they just take the presentation verbatim from the year before (even if they didn't present it,) read through it, and have trouble answering even not-so-tough questions on the material, because that material is not their specific area of expertise. Many lecturers will just take the syllabus, convert it to powerpoint, and read it verbatim for their lecture. This is a blatant waste of my time (I can read the syllabus just fine on my own, thank you -- I don't need someone to read it to me) and is not deserving of any "honor," or "respect" in my opinion.

For the most part, I have found the clinical faculty lectures to be much more enthusiastic, informative, better at answering questions, and, quite frankly more interesting.

But, those are just my experiences, of course.

Bingo. Didactic lecture sucks. Death by powerpoint. I suppose it's nice to scratch the surface, but who really "masters" anything via slides and 4 bullet points?

 

[DrYoda]

Death by powerpoint.

I could not think of a more perfect phrase to describe lecture.👍

 

[Old Grunt]

I could not think of a more perfect phrase to describe lecture.👍

It's an Army-ism. I wish I were creative enough to come up with it on my own, but alas, no.