MSPE

[Newyawk]

How important are the residents and/or attending comments on the MSPE? Are they interpreted in the context of the clerkship grades or are they used as a completely separate tool?
If a student has decent comments but honors everything is that going to look odd?
What about students that have glowing comments but have no honors and mostly Ps?

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[WiseOne]

How important are the residents and/or attending comments on the MSPE? Are they interpreted in the context of the clerkship grades or are they used as a completely separate tool?
If a student has decent comments but honors everything is that going to look odd?
What about students that have glowing comments but have no honors and mostly Ps?

IMO comments matter more than the grade. I think most PDs know how these rotations are graded. Good comments with low grade just means you did bad on the shelf. Good grade with mediocre comments means you got good test scores but didn't do so well in the clinical environment. I think the former situation is better (personally).

 

[Newyawk]

IMO comments matter more than the grade. I think most PDs know how these rotations are graded. Good comments with low grade just means you did bad on the shelf. Good grade with mediocre comments means you got good test scores but didn't do so well in the clinical environment. I think the former situation is better (personally).

Aright thanks. so my next question is what are the PDs looking for? Are bland comments going to hurt you? are they looking specifically for red flags?

 

[WiseOne]

The way I see it, bland comments are bad comments. It's a percentile thing. Most people have good to stellar comments. If you don't it's easy for them to see what that means. Comments like "Solid" or "performed to expectations" will hurt you but not eliminate you. Red flags are different and will eliminate you (these can be professionalism or personality issues). Someone like aProgDirector probably has the most wisdom on this sort of question.

 

[mymembernames]

@aProgDirector

 

[Dr. Doctor MD]

IMO comments matter more than the grade. I think most PDs know how these rotations are graded. Good comments with low grade just means you did bad on the shelf. Good grade with mediocre comments means you got good test scores but didn't do so well in the clinical environment. I think the former situation is better (personally).

I'm inclined to disagree. Most students will have a range of comments from mediocre "performed as expected" to glowing ones "amazing student/excellent work on team" Good luck interpreting 50+ comments in each MSPE to objectively compare 100s of applicants. Individual LORs in the specialty of interest are likely more important to really understand how the applicant is.

I'm picturing the PD comparing Johnny with 15 generic comments 20 excellent comments and 2 not so great comments to Sarah who had 30 generic comments 20 excellent comments and 1 not so great comment to Matt who has 10 generic and 10 excellent comments. I can't imagine anyone drawing meaningful differentiations between candidates this way, especially from students at different schools.

Now, Honors on the other hand speak for themselves. Many schools limit these to 10-20% and require good evals and good shelf scores to reach an Honors. (Yes there are exceptions at many schools, but overall Honors are hard to get and mean a lot). Not every good student will Honor, but most people who Honor are good students.

I'm not a program director, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I would bet against comments being more important or even equal to # of Honors (with the exception of bad comments/red flags)

 

[mimelim]

How important are the residents and/or attending comments on the MSPE? Are they interpreted in the context of the clerkship grades or are they used as a completely separate tool?
If a student has decent comments but honors everything is that going to look odd?
What about students that have glowing comments but have no honors and mostly Ps?

Can only comment in reference to a surgical subspecialty.

Phone call to your references/LOR writers trumps everything. Next come LOR, followed by comments in MSPE, followed by grades. We are a small field and we call the letter writers of everyone that we are seriously considering. The comments in the MSPE, like grades are read with a huge grain of salt. But, they give you the red-flags that nobody else will. People with patterns of behavior/professionalism issues pop up not infrequent and to be honest are fairly accurate in my experience.

 

[WiseOne]

I'm inclined to disagree. Most students will have a range of comments from mediocre "performed as expected" to glowing ones "amazing student/excellent work on team" Good luck interpreting 50+ comments in each MSPE to objectively compare 100s of applicants. Individual LORs in the specialty of interest are likely more important to really understand how the applicant is in

Now, Honors on the other hand speak for themselves. Many schools limit these to 10-20% and require good evals and good shelf scores to reach an Honors. (Yes there are exceptions at many schools, but overall Honors are hard to get and mean a lot. Not every good student will Honor, but most people who Honor are good students.

I'm not a program director, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I would bet against comments being more important or even equal to # of Honors (with the exception of bad comments/red flags)

Well yes in that case the comments would be part of receiving Honors. However my school was pretty lenient in giving out Honors as long as your shelf score was good and you had no red flag comments.

 

[MSTPlease]

I agree that it's probably too much to say the comments are definitely worth more than the grade, but I do think it's pretty obvious that great comments + not great grade = bad shelf and mediocre comments + great grade = good shelf. Don't most schools include the shelf scores and/or percentiles on the MSPE? Mine does, so it's pretty obvious how a student ends up with mismatched comments and grades. I absolutely bombed one of my shelves (still passed, but I believe it was the worst score in my whole class) so even though my comments for one clerkship involve things like "best ever" and "top 1% of all students in my career" I didn't even finish in the top half of the class for the final grade on that clerkship.

 

[Newyawk]

It sounds like @mimelim is saying that their department uses MSPE largely to check for red flags whereas @WiseOne is saying they think its used as a primary measure of performance. I am much more inclined to believe that programs that are sifting through 100s of applicants are a lot less likely to care about the minutiae in the MSPE. Maybe when comparing 2 applicants theyll go back...
Also - ive noticed ive been getting much better comments from attendings than i have been from residents. Any comments on this? My residents have ranged from "good student, consistent" to excellent etc. but my attending comments have been outstanding

 

[WiseOne]

It sounds like @mimelim is saying that their department uses MSPE largely to check for red flags whereas @WiseOne is saying they think its used as a primary measure of performance. I am much more inclined to believe that programs that are sifting through 100s of applicants are a lot less likely to care about the minutiae in the MSPE. Maybe when comparing 2 applicants theyll go back...
Also - ive noticed ive been getting much better comments from attendings than i have been from residents. Any comments on this? My residents have ranged from "good student, consistent" to excellent etc. but my attending comments have been outstanding

The MSPE includes many things. I'm saying that if you're choosing between Honors + lackluster comments and High Pass + great comments, in my opinion, it can be preferable to be in the latter situation. PDs don't look always comments when deciding who to interview but they certainly look through them on interview day (from my experience this has been true since my rotation evaluations came up in most of my interviews, specifically one rotation where I got a HP but some of the comments were odd).

 

[NickNaylor]

In psychiatry, the MSPE is important but not the end-all-be-all. Because psychiatry is relatively uncompetitive, there's less pressure to use a variety of "standardized" ERAS components - for example, step 1 scores, class rank, etc. - to filter out applicants and create a more enriched pool of applicants to spend more time reviewing.

I think how people view the MSPE, the relative importance of comments vs. class rank vs. scores, etc. will vary from specialty to speciality and even from program to program. I don't think there's a way to speak about these things in broad generalities beyond "they're important." But the relative level of importance can vary.