Med school easier than undergrad?

[OncoCaP]

---

Members don't see this ad.

One of my pre-med classmates was telling me that some of his friends were finding med school to actually be *easier* than their undergraduate degree (they were engineers). I get the impression that these folks are in the tiny minority, but just out of curiousity I ask the question: do you or someone you know well find med school to be easier than your undergraduate education (or easy as well)? (my goal here is to determine if these people were totally blowing smoke or not)

 

[lilmo]

Wow! When I was applying to medical school someone shared this analogy with me and I have found it to be super accurate:

Learning in undergrad is like drinking out of a water fountain, you can take it all in at your own pace. Once you hit medical school your smack in front of a spraying fire hyrant, information is rushing at you full force.

 

[Mperor]

I agree that med school is easier. All the information that you are tested on in med school is presented in a very straight forward manner. Whereas in undergrad (at least in mine) the tests examined your ability to take the information they gave you and make additional leaps of understanding to come to a solution to the problem. Much more difficult.

Sure the pace is quicker here, but it is just digest, and regurgitate

 

[dutchman]

I can't concieve of any way medschool could be easier than Undergrad. I even have a masters in engineering and I don't think even that will come close to the gazillion things I have to learn in medschool.

 

[bgreet]

*shrug* it's not as bad as you would think, it's just different and takes a bit of adjustment to

 

[Arctic Char]

i think it depends on a lot of factors. i worked harder as an undergrad, but i can't say whether the material is particularly more difficult. as an undergrad you are dealing with so many principles - principles that if you don't get from the outset, you are going to have to work very very hard to excell with subsequent material. med school doesn't necessarily have principles that take great stretches of the imgaination, or require using your brain in entirely different ways (at least not years 1 &2), but you are held responsible for more material.

my $0.02

 

[pratik7]

Med school is pretty easy in the sense that it is memorize...test...memory dump ....repeat. If you put lot of effort into med school you can easily do well. Math, physics and, enginnering is conceptually difficult and takes a long time to master even though the volume isnt as heavy.

 

[LifetimeDoc]

This is what worries me about attending medical school. I'm much better at understanding how something works, and not just memorizing a list of facts. In fact, I have a hard time memorizing facts unless I understand the mechanism. Anybody can google a fact or can look it up in a book, but it takes somebody who's learned how the body functions as a whole and about pathological conditions to determine the treatment plan for a patient. Frankly, I don't understand why they hold to the memorize, regurgitate, forget model as you will be needing to understand how the body functions when you are practicing.

 

[OncoCaP]

This is what worries me about attending medical school. I'm much better at understanding how something works, and not just memorizing a list of facts. In fact, I have a hard time memorizing facts unless I understand the mechanism. Anybody can google a fact or can look it up in a book, but it takes somebody who's learned how the body functions as a whole and about pathological conditions to determine the treatment plan for a patient. Frankly, I don't understand why they hold to the memorize, regurgitate, forget model as you will be needing to understand how the body functions when you are practicing.

I guess it's a matter of learning the language and pacing of the medical field first. After you have those foundations you can build practical understanding and concepts more efficiently? As far as the memorize ... test .. forget & restart model, maybe it tests our ability to learn something quickly as needed and the hope is that we retain enough so that we could refresh that memory if necessary. Also, exercising the memory this way would probably help build it up as well. Maybe the way that medicine is practiced, it is important to remember a lot of details.

 

[1Path]

One of my pre-med classmates was telling me that some of his friends were finding med school to actually be *easier* than their undergraduate degree (they were engineers).

I've taken undergrad ChemE courses and Med school courses. The ChemE courses were by far the hardest classes I've EVER had in my entire life!😱

 

[RxnMan]

This is what worries me about attending medical school. I'm much better at understanding how something works, and not just memorizing a list of facts. In fact, I have a hard time memorizing facts unless I understand the mechanism. Anybody can google a fact or can look it up in a book, but it takes somebody who's learned how the body functions as a whole and about pathological conditions to determine the treatment plan for a patient...

Check out some of the "engineers in medicine" threads here in this forum. Many of them have the same worries and some discuss med school coping strategies.

...Frankly, I don't understand why they hold to the memorize, regurgitate, forget model as you will be needing to understand how the body functions when you are practicing.

Because there's so much to know, they're trying to give you a good foundation for all of the specialities, and they need to get it to you asap. Understanding and synthesis comes later. I have a hard time not trying to understand the fine points of a given organ or system - I've learned to trust to the curriculum and that the whole picture will eventually present itself.

 

[Fannibal]

I think it all depends on what your own personal talents matched with your undergraduate major and medical school.

I was engineering as an undergrad, and I don't remember undergrad being so tedious. I did have many long lab assignments, but time flew by quickly when I did them. Now that I am in med school, I have to plant my ass down to study for hours a day, I can't seem to pull it off without many frequent breaks.

 

[Dookter]

I will have to say that, at least in the classroom, there is less B.S. to deal with in medical school. There are no group projects where the teachers splits the groups up to where all the smart kids are separated and have to do all the work for the dumb kids, etc. There are no papers to write on some BS topic that you don't care about. It's really just learn, learn, learn. I do think medical school is harder than undergrad for me, but there is much less shifting gears....I'm no longer waking up, going to work, going to class, running to the lab to start some PCR reactions, running to class, cramming in lunch, running back to the lab, going home and doing lab reports, etc. It's more work, but in a much less chaotic way.

 

[Droopy Snoopy]

This is what worries me about attending medical school. I'm much better at understanding how something works, and not just memorizing a list of facts. In fact, I have a hard time memorizing facts unless I understand the mechanism. Anybody can google a fact or can look it up in a book, but it takes somebody who's learned how the body functions as a whole and about pathological conditions to determine the treatment plan for a patient. Frankly, I don't understand why they hold to the memorize, regurgitate, forget model as you will be needing to understand how the body functions when you are practicing.

Some of my friends call this the penguin analogy. There's only so much room on the iceburg, so as new penguins are crawling onto one side, a few penguins necessarily have to fall off the other side. The profs go over the important stuff many times and in various forms, so it's not like you learn how to recognize a systolic murmur and then flush that info down the toilet. Those penguins get like, superentrenched or something.

Learning "how the body functions as a whole" sounds like it came right off your personal statement (no offense intended because it was probably on mine somewhere too). That statement drastically oversimplifies the huge body of knowledge that even the fire hydrant/mental bulemia approach to teaching/learning isn't sufficient to cover. There's simply no other way to do it. One just has to go through it before having any chance of getting out on the wards and actually treating people.

Your particular learning style will help in some areas (phys for example) and hurt in others (anatomy). Regarding the OP, I worked full-time throughout undergrad, maybe crammed in the nights leading up to an exam, and came out with a 3.8+. If I did that now my scores would be in the teens. The pace and volume is grossly different; we go through a college semester's worth of material in a single block, with 6-10 blocks per year. Somebody above mentioned the manner of presentation, and to me it's just the reverse. Profs throw out the vocab, stats, and mechanisms left and right. You have to go home and relate it to disease processes and pathology, then integrate it with everything taught before and after (our exams are comprehensive). This may well be easier for engineers, because they're used to learning the building blocks and doing whatever with them, but for a spoonfed bio major...

What's easier for me is finally being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Plus there's no longer any question of, "When will I ever use this?" because you will undoubtedly have to use it very shortly, if only not to look like a ***** on rounds. Compare that against forcing yourself to memorize all the intricacies of SN1 vs. SN2 rxns, or trying to care enough to learn how Mayan architecture influenced early American art. What's also nice is being able to set my own pace (from home vs. attending lecture, textbook vs. lecture notes, etc.).

 

[OncoCaP]

...

Your particular learning style will help in some areas (phys for example) and hurt in others (anatomy). Regarding the OP, I worked full-time throughout undergrad, maybe crammed in the nights leading up to an exam, and came out with a 3.8+. If I did that now my scores would be in the teens. The pace and volume is grossly different; we go through a college semester's worth of material in a single block, with 6-10 blocks per year. Somebody above mentioned the manner of presentation, and to me it's just the reverse. Profs throw out the vocab, stats, and mechanisms left and right. You have to go home and relate it to disease processes and pathology, then integrate it with everything taught before and after (our exams are comprehensive). This may well be easier for engineers, because they're used to learning the building blocks and doing whatever with them, but for a spoonfed bio major...

...

Wow, I've heard from several people that the material that must be memorized is usually pretty clear and perhaps even organized in a set of (?preprinted?) notes that you just memorize with a little conceptual understanding and you're good to go. (I'm not suggesting that one should only do the minimum). I heard that textbooks are useless because the material is all over the place and not condensed enough with respect to what needs to be known. Evidently that's not the case at your school (might I ask where you are going to school?)??

 

[Dookter]

Wow, I've heard from several people that the material that must be memorized is usually pretty clear and perhaps even organized in a set of (?preprinted?) notes that you just memorize with a little conceptual understanding and you're good to go. (I'm not suggesting that one should only do the minimum). I heard that textbooks are useless because the material is all over the place and not condensed enough with respect to what needs to be known. Evidently that's not the case at your school (might I ask where you are going to school?)??

Um, it's not that simple. If it were that simple, we'd all probably ace everything. There is a LOT of memorization in medical school, but you still have to understand it to get the test questions right. Even in my gross anatomy class, you have to understand what is going on. And many times you will be given sets of notes to learn, but they only go so far. What happens when you have a question like, "X happens. How does the body react?" You have to integrate the information and actually think. And also, even with the material that you do just flat out memorize, there is so much of it that it can be pretty crazy. I just took a test today that should actually have been relatively easy, but there were a few questions that I had absolutely no idea about b/c I have never even heard of the topic before. So having those notes packets won't quite cut it.

 

[1Path]

Wow, I've heard from several people that the material that must be memorized is usually pretty clear and perhaps even organized in a set of (?preprinted?) notes that you just memorize with a little conceptual understanding and you're good to go. (I'm not suggesting that one should only do the minimum). I heard that textbooks are useless because the material is all over the place and not condensed enough with respect to what needs to be known. Evidently that's not the case at your school (might I ask where you are going to school?)??

I agree, not that simple. I found that understanding the material simply reinforces what you've learned/memorized/know. And that textbooks are great for clearing up concepts you didn't understand from the notes/syllabus.

 

[Droopy Snoopy]

Wow, I've heard from several people that the material that must be memorized is usually pretty clear and perhaps even organized in a set of (?preprinted?) notes that you just memorize with a little conceptual understanding and you're good to go. (I'm not suggesting that one should only do the minimum). I heard that textbooks are useless because the material is all over the place and not condensed enough with respect to what needs to be known. Evidently that's not the case at your school (might I ask where you are going to school?)??

I prefer to stay anonymous online, since from time to time I have to vent about my classmates or an instructor on here, some of whom I know surf SDN. Textbooks are for the most part like you say, but they do help occasionally. More than a few of my professors do put out objectives notes, but they're not as helpful as you might think. For example, a recent pathology exam included material on liver, pancreas, gallbladder, and GI. The liver prof sent out a list of objectives that was 24 pages long (just the liver section mind you, which probably accounted for less than 1/16 of the material we're required to learn that block when you consider pharmacology, microbiology, and genetics were testing on the same block).

So yeah it was clear, organized, and preprinted, but was it as simple as sitting down and memorizing? On the exam, he gives us a stem with a CBC and liver panel showing levels of hematocrit, WBCs, direct vs. indirect bilirubin, coproporphyrins, AST, ALT, etc., plus a biopsy slide (bonus!). You have to first of all know what all that is, what pathology it suggests if something's high or low, what's abnormal about the microanatomy, and what disease it all suggests. And you haven't even gotten to the actual question yet, because that asks you what the best course of treatment for the patient will be. But to even get to any of that, you have to go through first year and learn about the histology of the liver, the physiology, the biochemistry, the gross morphology, etc. etc. etc. That means trying to call back all those poor penguins who got booted off the iceburg so many moons ago and weasling some info out of them. Fun!

 

[crazy_cavalier]

The quality of the material in med school is much, much easier.

However,
The quantity of the material is much, much, much more.



I was an engineer in undergrad.

 

[deleted77919]

As other have mentioned and I'll expand upon the preclinical years are about exposure. It isn't as simple as memorize, test, forget, repeat. The idea is having learned the basics once, when you start your ortho residency you can pick things up faster and learn new things better than if you'd never seen it before. Since the class will go into a variety of specialties this exposure is quite broad, but not hugely in depth, that'll come during residency.

 

[ubcredfox]

It's most certainly not that easy as other people seem to make it out to be. Like an above poster said, at our school our exams our comprehensive. One set each in December and in June. You have to know all of the material for those exams, and to be able to interrelate material between blocks and to correlate concepts together. Add the volume of information that you're given (college semester/1 week block) and you've got the toughest educational experience you'll ever experience. That's my opinion, but this is rough.

 

[Law2Doc]

Wow, I've heard from several people that the material that must be memorized is usually pretty clear and perhaps even organized in a set of (?preprinted?) notes that you just memorize with a little conceptual understanding and you're good to go. (I'm not suggesting that one should only do the minimum). I heard that textbooks are useless because the material is all over the place and not condensed enough with respect to what needs to be known. Evidently that's not the case at your school (might I ask where you are going to school?)??

Textbooks are secondary resources and not used the same way as college. And most schools use note-sets which, along with the lecture information covers all or most of the testable information. But frequently the note-sets you are responsible for are about as long as a textbook, so condensing of information isn't really what you should expect.
The material is probably conceptually easier than a lot of college courses, but the volume far exceeds anything you will ever see in college. Anyone who says that med school is easier than college is either (1) mis-remembering what college was like, (2) had a really atypically horrible time in college, (3) is slacking in med school, or (4) is messing with you.

 

[emtji]

med school was significantly easier than undergrad. it wasn't so much that the material was more or less challenging, but the competition in med school didn't hold a candle to the competition in undergrad. simply, it was easier to be in the top quarter of the class in med school than in undergrad.

depends on where you go, i think

 

[Sophie]

I agree that med school is easier. All the information that you are tested on in med school is presented in a very straight forward manner. Whereas in undergrad (at least in mine) the tests examined your ability to take the information they gave you and make additional leaps of understanding to come to a solution to the problem. Much more difficult.

Sure the pace is quicker here, but it is just digest, and regurgitate

I'm a great leaper, but a bad memorizer. In undergrad I spent about 5 hours/day on school total (going to class, doing reading, etc), had every weekend free, and began studying for finals the day before the exam. In med school I spend at least 10 hours/day on school, study almost every weekend, and somehow ramp this all up roughly 2 weeks before finals.

Med school is infinitely harder than undergrad, imo.

 

[deleted77919]

med school was significantly easier than undergrad. it wasn't so much that the material was more or less challenging, but the competition in med school didn't hold a candle to the competition in undergrad. simply, it was easier to be in the top quarter of the class in med school than in undergrad.

depends on where you go, i think

haha . . . hmm.

I suppose that does depend on where you go, but I haven't met anyone at my school that has felt this way.

 

[beary]

I think in terms of difficulty, residency >> med school >>>>> undergrad.

In terms of quality of life, undergrad >>> residency >>>>>>>>>>>>> med school. 😉

 

[NonTradMed]

I think it all depends on what your own personal talents matched with your undergraduate major and medical school.

I was engineering as an undergrad, and I don't remember undergrad being so tedious. I did have many long lab assignments, but time flew by quickly when I did them. Now that I am in med school, I have to plant my ass down to study for hours a day, I can't seem to pull it off without many frequent breaks.

That is what's getting to me in med school too. I LOVED writing programs for my labs. I may have to stay in lab 20 hours a week to do it but the time just flew by. Studying from 9am until 11pm is much, much, much harder to me than being in lab for the same stretch of time. I didn't realize this when I was an undergrad, always envious of my bio friends who could just 'plant their butt in a chair and read their notes' while I had to wade through hundreds of lines of code with no guarantee that my program will even work! But now I realize that I had it much easier because what I did was fun, while studying all day is a soul sucking experience.

The quality of the material in med school is much, much easier.

However,
The quantity of the material is much, much, much more.

This cannot be stressed enough to engineering premeds. We should just paste this onto every engineering school with a premed population. The hardest part in my engineering classes was understanding the concepts and applying it to a problem. Once I got that done, I was assured a decent grade. Rarely did I go over my notes more than twice. The notes themselves were more like supplements and the problem sets/labs/concepts were the main meat of the course. Med school is all about reading the notes and remembering every minute detail and there's about twice the amount of material that an average college courseload would have you go through.

Textbooks are secondary resources and not used the same way as college. And most schools use note-sets which, along with the lecture information covers all or most of the testable information. But frequently the note-sets you are responsible for are about as long as a textbook, so condensing of information isn't really what you should expect.
The material is probably conceptually easier than a lot of college courses, but the volume far exceeds anything you will ever see in college. Anyone who says that med school is easier than college is either (1) mis-remembering what college was like, (2) had a really atypically horrible time in college, (3) is slacking in med school, or (4) is messing with you.

Or is going to a questionable med school outside this country! 😛

 

[OncoCaP]

Well, it's pretty clear from the above that the rumor is confirmed ... that there are people who think that med school is easier than undergrad ... as much as they are in the minority and might have this impression for any number of reasons, there are people who have this experience.

As for me, I'm bracing for the firehose (but I love this stuff, so in a way, I can wait to get all wet).

"Quantity has a {brutal} quality all its own" -- Joseph Stalin.

 

[Kazema]

I think the hardest thing about med school is (like people have already said) sitting yourself down for huge chunks of time and looking over the same stuff over and over again.

I've changed my approach to studying several times over the past year and a half; I used to be all about reading the notes over and over until I burned them in. Now I only look at them twice (at most 3 times) - once during lecture and once when reviewing for an exam (twice if the lecture's particularly dense). I spend the rest of my time reading other sources like Robbins, UpToDate, Harrisons, BRS books, and the simplified textbooks written specifically for med students.

So instead of learning the random facts they want me to know, I learn what I want to learn and assume it covers what they want me to know too. So far my grades have been about the same and I'm actually learning as opposed to memorizing, though by the time I have to review the notes for the exam I feel like it's a huge waste of time and it gets a little hard sometimes to make myself go through them. But seeing the same info from multiple sources and multiple points of view makes me remember stuff much better.

 

[45408]

I'm no longer waking up, going to work, going to class, running to the lab to start some PCR reactions, running to class, cramming in lunch, running back to the lab, going home and doing lab reports, etc. It's more work, but in a much less chaotic way.

Word to the less chaos. I volunteered, worked in EMS (12-24 hours shifts, often overnights followed by a day of class), did research, ran a student organization, handed in petty assignments all the time, etc. I don't even do my grocery shopping or other miscellaneous errands (we only have one car, and my wife gets it, so she has to do all the errands). Much more straight-forward now, but the actually academics are a lot harder now. Undergrad biochem is just laughable now.

If a pre-med told me that med school is easier than undergrad, I'd laugh in their face.

 

[45408]

med school was significantly easier than undergrad. it wasn't so much that the material was more or less challenging, but the competition in med school didn't hold a candle to the competition in undergrad. simply, it was easier to be in the top quarter of the class in med school than in undergrad.

depends on where you go, i think

Um, yeah, it depends where you go. I could study really hard for an undergrad exam in several classes and then go into the exam knowing in advance that I'd probably have the high score. That's completely absurd now.

 

[Dookter]

Like every single topic on SDN, we have to remember how it works most of the time. It seems like everytime a topic is brought up here, someone chimes in, "Nu-uh, I had a third cousin whose brother's wife was a quadruple major in spanish, chemical engineering, physics, and math. She was some sort of freak who never slept over 2 hours a night. She said medical school was half the work of undergrad." [Sorry for the extreme sarcasm.] The point is that there will always be people [even people that we know personally] who had it harder in undergrad for some weird reason [like this one guy I knew in undergrad who had like three minors, got his bachelors AND masters in nuclear engineering, and was a paid researcher during his four undergrad years]. But for most of you out there reading this: medical school will be harder.

 

[Law2Doc]

Well, it's pretty clear from the above that the rumor is confirmed ... that there are people who think that med school is easier than undergrad ...

Not really. All that is confirmed is that a minority of people are willing to say that. It's equally likely that this bears out my "people are messing with you" suggestion as much as your conclusion.🙂
Expect the worst. I doubt you will be disappointed.

 

[DoctorFunk]

Expect the worst. I doubt you will be disappointed.

Classic!

 

[OncoCaP]

Not really. All that is confirmed is that a minority of people are willing to say that. It's equally likely that this bears out my "people are messing with you" suggestion as much as your conclusion.🙂
Expect the worst. I doubt you will be disappointed.

Oh, I'm bracing for impact ... don't worry. I wanted a challenge and an opportunity to make a difference, so now I'm going to get my wish.

I just don't think that many people who don't know each other are lying about whether med school is really harder. I know there are some punishing undergraduate programs out there (certain engineering departments have a particular glee and reputation about this -- even though the nature of the test problems is clearly different between, say 1st & 2nd year medicine and say, physics or engineering).

I also think there are some schools where the students are less likely to be falling over each other to show how much smarter they are than their peers and where the profs don't get any joy from asking there students to name 15 SNAREs and which cells they are found in where they act in the cell. It's not beyond the imagination to see some variation in the programs and experiences.

I'm not suggesting I'm going to get to kick back ... I'm planning to bust my tail, and hopefully I will love the material as much as I think I will!

 

[potato51]

so far college is a cinch compared to med school. But then again, college was a cakewalk compared to high school too.

 

[45408]

I just don't think that many people who don't know each other are lying about whether med school is really harder. I know there are some punishing undergraduate programs out there (certain engineering departments have a particular glee and reputation about this -- even though the nature of the test problems is clearly different between, say 1st & 2nd year medicine and say, physics or engineering).

Also, there are probably people who majored in something they hate, so studying for it was always torture, and now they actually like what they're doing (or they've found good friends in med school, but didn't have them in undergrad), and now they are enjoying life more.

 

[princessd3]

I find med school to be a lot easier than undergrad. I always did my best in my undergrad biology courses and for me med school has just been one biology class after the other.

 

[princessd3]

This is what worries me about attending medical school. I'm much better at understanding how something works, and not just memorizing a list of facts. In fact, I have a hard time memorizing facts unless I understand the mechanism. Anybody can google a fact or can look it up in a book, but it takes somebody who's learned how the body functions as a whole and about pathological conditions to determine the treatment plan for a patient. Frankly, I don't understand why they hold to the memorize, regurgitate, forget model as you will be needing to understand how the body functions when you are practicing.

I do not agree with the memorize, regurgitate and forget way of learning and have not had to use that in medical school. It is possible to take the time to understand. Even in gross anatomy you don't necessarily have to memorize a bunch of facts if you take the time to understand/visualize in 3-D how the body is put together and you learn muscle attachments. You can then draw upon your knowledge to determine what arteries etc would necessarily run near the structure, or determine the action of the muscle for example based on origins and attachments.

It's hard to avoid some memorizations but I try to avoid rote memorization and try to make sense out of the information. It is indeed possible.

 

[Bubb Rubb]

One of my pre-med classmates was telling me that some of his friends were finding med school to actually be *easier* than their undergraduate degree (they were engineers). I get the impression that these folks are in the tiny minority, but just out of curiousity I ask the question: do you or someone you know well find med school to be easier than your undergraduate education (or easy as well)? (my goal here is to determine if these people were totally blowing smoke or not)

yes, i found the first two years to be quite a bit easier than undergrad. less time consuming? not really, at least not during crunch time second year. but easier, yes.

<-- did CS at an ivy. worked like a dog. now gets more sleep than back then, even on call...

 

[psipsina]

In medschool I spend a ton more time studying sometimes just to pass, so in this respect it is harder. But I don't feel like I'm being weeded out anymore, which removes a ton of stress that I felt from undergrad. And everything that I'm taking I am interested in and seems applicable to my future practice. Also I get enough quality clinical time which keeps me motivated. So I wouldn't say its easier, but I would say despite the studying hermit I am forced to be sometimes, I enjoy medschool alot more than I enjoyed undergrad.

 

[crazy_cavalier]

The issue here is NOT "memorization". You do have to cope with a lot of memorization, but you are not constantly trying to memorize large lists throughout medical school. The challenge, as Kazema (I believe) mentioned, is the fact that you have a ****load of notes to go through and most likely you are going through them multiple times. This is what leads to my claim that the VOLUME of material is really overwhelming. The quality itself is simple and understandable; if I could take out any one lecture and look at that lecture alone, it's very easy. Now compound that by 15 lectures for one class that is part of a 3-class series on a block exam... you're looking at about ~40 lectures for one day of exams... now x 3 days of exams for a whole block exam week, now you're in the neighborhood of hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes to go through (which cover some 90+ lectures) and you go through them numerous times.


Fire hydrant is a good analogy.


It's bearable to some extent because these HELL WEEKS are pretty pulsatile... we get a week of Hell about once every one to 1.5 months or so. There are sweet, brief windows of time where I spend almost no time studying right after those exams when material is new and the next set of exams is far away... those days of happiness and ignorance are my favorite. I dont even waste any effort studying, because as mentioned earlier, you're just going to wind up reviewing them AGAIN when the exam times come up...

 

[Green Chimneys]

I find that the biggest difference in medical school is that the grading curve is shifted to the right. In undergraduate, the split between a B/C was usually set at the class average, which in most large lecture science classes was around 60-65%. Failing usually meant that you had worse than 40%. Getting an A usually only required a grade somewhere in the 80s. In medical school, the cutoff for pass/fail in all of my classes is 65% and I have heard that in some schools that cutoff is set at 70%. An honors grade can often require a score in the mid 90s.

I don't find the exams or the material to be any more difficult but there are two factors to consider. 1) exams are spread out such that where an undergraduate exam usually encompassed 8-12 lectures, a medical school exam typically encompases 25-35 lectures. 2) Performance on an exam that would have earned me a B-/C+ in undergraduate would likely fail me in medical school.

Keep in mind that people you are referring to may have majored in the subject they are currently taking. A biochemistry major typically learns more biochemistry in 4 years of undergraduate than is taught in 8-20 weeks of medical school. The key is picking out what you do know from undergraduate and what you don't so you don't get slammed with new material on the test.

 

[Law2Doc]

I find that the biggest difference in medical school is that the grading curve is shifted to the right. In undergraduate, the split between a B/C was usually set at the class average, which in most large lecture science classes was around 60-65%. Failing usually meant that you had worse than 40%. Getting an A usually only required a grade somewhere in the 80s. In medical school, the cutoff for pass/fail in all of my classes is 65% and I have heard that in some schools that cutoff is set at 70%. An honors grade can often require a score in the mid 90s.

Not only that, but all the people in undergrad who traditionally got the Cs, Ds and Fs at your undergrad didn't get into med school. While most med school tests are not curved, somehow the tests are often engineered such that the grade distribution still comes out that way. So now the "worst" ranked person in the class is probably still someone who got mostly A's in college. It adds to the stress level when anyone in the class is smart and capable enough to get the top grade, and yet half the people in class suddenly learn they are no longer at the top of the pack.

 

[1Path]

Not only that, but all the people in undergrad who traditionally got the Cs, Ds and Fs at your undergrad didn't get into med school. .

Not necessarily because it depends on WHY you made the C's,D's, and F'sin the first place. For some it was stress, working much, unability to adjust to college, or any combo of the above. What I've found is that grades in undergrad are simply a matter of who studies, NOT who is the "smartest".

somehow the tests are often engineered such that the grade distribution still comes out that way..

Fancy way for saying curved.

So now the "worst" ranked person in the class is probably still someone who got mostly A's in college. It adds to the stress level when anyone in the class is smart and capable enough to get the top grade, and yet half the people in class suddenly learn they are no longer at the top of the pack.

Just as those who think med school is easier may be "deluding themselves" according to some, those who think med school is harder may say that simply to make themselves feel "smarter" than someone with "just" an undergrad degree in say, engineering.

 

[Dr. McDreamy]

med school isn't as hard as i expected. especially second year (which is going way better than first year for me). it's still way harder than undergrad though.

 

[Law2Doc]

Fancy way for saying curved.

Not so. Curved involves tinkering with the grade distribution after the fact. In med school usually everyone could get an A. But the tests' raw scores frequently result in a pretty impressively "bell-like" spread without any tinkering.

 

[Law2Doc]

Just as those who think med school is easier may be "deluding themselves" according to some, those who think med school is harder may say that simply to make themselves feel "smarter" than someone with "just" an undergrad degree in say, engineering.

LOL. You will see (those of you who aren't in med school yet). FWIW I know quite a few engineers in med school who would certainly agree that they are working more hours now than in undergrad. Different kind of work, but more of it. But perhaps it's something you can only appreciate by experiencing it, I guess.

I think there is a semantic argument going on here in terms of the words easier/harder. Some people concede they are logging many more hours in med school, but won't say it's harder because (1) the work isn't complicated, just the volume, and (2) it's something they enjoy, so the effort doesn't hurt as much.

 

[45408]

I do not agree with the memorize, regurgitate and forget way of learning and have not had to use that in medical school. It is possible to take the time to understand. Even in gross anatomy you don't necessarily have to memorize a bunch of facts if you take the time to understand/visualize in 3-D how the body is put together and you learn muscle attachments. You can then draw upon your knowledge to determine what arteries etc would necessarily run near the structure, or determine the action of the muscle for example based on origins and attachments.

I agree, for anatomy. But not for biochemistry. My school is known for having a biochemistry leviathan, and for some things, you could use concepts, but for a very, very large part of it, you just needed to know it, and know it in excruciating detail. Maybe you could take the time to understand it all thoroughly, but that would require about 5 times more than the time there is available.

 

[1Path]

LOL. You will see (those of you who aren't in med school yet). FWIW I know quite a few engineers in med school who would certainly agree that they are working more hours now than in undergrad. Different kind of work, but more of it. But perhaps it's something you can only appreciate by experiencing it, I guess..

I'd gladly take the 18-22/semester hours of med school over the same hours in an Engineering program in ChemE, Nucs, or Ele. Twenty lecture/chapter exam in med school classes WITH med students? Bring it on...................................... again.😉
Ten page Thermodynamics exam USING DiffyQ???? Hell naw! But maybe you need to experience BOTH to know where I'm coming from!😉