To respond to Dr. Hope's thread:
I'm a 3rd year at NYU and my class (2006) was the class that got hit hard by unexpected low curves last semester. Shariq's posts are pretty much on target, but when he says 100 failed pathology and 80 failed pharm, that's a little misleading.
1)Actually, 80 people failed pathology and 70 people failed pharm
2)when we say "fail", that doesn't mean you get booted. that only means you have the opportunity to remediate these courses during the summer
3)with all these people that had to remediate, only 17 people out of our 300+ 2nd year class got the boot.
So why did they remediate so many students in the first place? We all thought it was b/c of all the rumors you read on SDN: no room in clinics, money scam, blah blah. Well, trust me, when we first heard of all those remediations, my class got together a petition and threatened to write letters to ADA, NYTimes, ASDA, etc...and this past month the top deans in our school set up a meeting to meet w/ our 2nd year class to address these issues.
In a nutshell, here's what they said:
1)No room in clinic: Dean Alfano told us that this is not a issue at all. He made a point that there are 10 clinics of 45 3rd/4th years in each of these clinics. And at any given point in a day, all the chairs are never filled due to patient disappointments and what not. I started clinic back in May and I can attest that I have NEVER seen a full clinic in ANY of the 10 clinics...
2)Why the recent low curves in path and pharm? For pharm, the professor told the deans that some of the students hadn't grasped some concepts and felt that remediation was justified. Now with systems pathology, I still have no idea why we only got a 3 point curve vs. last year's 9 point curve.
3)Booting for the money: Dean Alfano started to laugh at this. He joked why not get 4 years tuition instead of 2 years....
There are some more issues they addressed (ie: vitalbook, transcripts) but I'll post more if anybody has questions.
Personally, do I think they are trying to boot us? I'm not sure. At first when I learned about the 80 and 70 failures in path and pharm, yes, i thought all the rumors in SDN was true. But, in the end, they ultimately booted out 17 people out of, what, 325+? So, I'm not so sure that they are trying to boot us out...I think they are trying to send a message to the new 2nd years. ie: don't expect and rely on a curve.
Lastly, the Deans emphasized that the majority of the failures were in the 2 courses they deemed most important and demanding: path and pharm. They also stressed that NYU students perform very well in pathology on the Part I Boards.
ok, time to end the novel...
EHA DDS said:
I am a D1 at NYU and the administration assured us that they do not intentionally drop anybody. From what i hear it is the students who are the root of this problem ie. they fail out. Everyone says that if you put in the time and are reponsible, you'll be fine.