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- Aug 28, 2007
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I'm genuinely curious if anyone actually read that entire post.I agree with the stamina statement (personal experience). It's not the same to live 1 block from your campus and/or own your own car where mommy and daddy give you free gasoline and give you an unlimited credit card where you can eat sirloin steaks every day if you felt like it than to live reasonably far away from the campus, on a "good" traffic day you make it home in 90-120 minutes travelling on two buses (half of the times grabbing hold of the metal bar with another 10 people on top of you with the exit doors flapping wide open.. and it's raining cats and dogs and all of the streets are flooded with dark colored water) and you only get 10 dollars a week to eat. period.
My grades usually go up when I am not wasting 5 hours a day travelling in hideous traffic in public transportation and when I eat.. at least something reasonably decent. I've had days when I only ate cold cereal for breakfast and a gatorade and was too nauseous coming back home at 11 pm to even eat dinner. You can be the smartest brainiac in the universe, and still perform subparly if you're physically exhausted. You'd think in the ideal world there's always a car ride waiting for you, there's always a freebee lunch waiting for you, and there is no traffic, but in my experience that is baloney. You fend your self off in whatever way you can and celebrate the times you get amazing grades.
To add to that I'm hypotensive and hypoglycemic at really oddball times. I almost never get hypoglycemia on a bad day when I barely have time or cash to eat anything, it usually hits in days I'm rested, have light classes and have eaten pretty well. It's probably a good thing I don't own a car, I would have probably crashed it big time. 🙄
Despite all of that and more, my grades aren't in last place in the class (I hate skipping classes unless it's absolutely necesary) and my associative clinical nowledge is quite good. I don't know if it's something about American students being holy saints or being naïve, but at least in my experience, many people with amazing grades cheat their way through med school. There is an insanely well organized digitalized exam mafia. I'm not the type that taddle-tales on people; but even if I didn't know about who took advantage of the mafia, you know in the clinical rounds who knows medicine and who doesn't. I don't know everything about every specialty (I'll never understand Dermatology and I had very little exposure to Rheumatology in the 3rd year), but I do know a lot and retain the information. You know someone cheats their way through med school when on an easy exam they barely pass and go complaining to the teacher that the exam was hard when it isn't and will go forth a lot of time and effort to improve the grade (which rarely works but it's amusing to watch the show). During my 1st Rheuma partial, some of the exam was open to personal clinical interpretation. Well this one guy had the dumbest answer in the universe as his diagnosis and we all had a great show rubbing it to him in his face.After realizing the teacher wasn't going to boost his grade, he gave up and had a laugh. Still doesn't want to study harder though.
People also might not realize that sometimes, exams aren't always designed for clinical interpretation. Sometimes exams put in a bucketload of biochemical lab tests that aren't even the first option and don't ask any questions about symptoms or disease pathology (my strength). Sometimes, exams are so poorly designed that the question key is wrong or there's multiple possible answers. You could be the best doctor ever and still flunk an exam if the question key is wrong and your university doesn't want to admit they screwed up.
I don't want to give excuses that I'm not an A-list honors student (quite frankly the honors students I knoew creep me out because they are either show signs of being the bureaucratic red-tape officials of tomorrow or they're creepy workaholics); but to say someone is an unworthy doctor because they didn't get 10's in every exam (in which they could have either cheated, they were just plain lucky or they memorized it and forgot the content the next day) isn't objective. That's one thing I like about oral exams. You can't cheat on them because the teacher is in front of you and it's a situation in which either you know the subject content or you don't. I had a classmate who had an insanely good grade average in her first 2 years of med school (and was as far as I know an honest student) and she bombed her oral bar exam because she got nervous.
And then I've heard of people who didn't have amazing grades in med school, but they had a great internship where they busted their rears working and did amazingly well on the bars. Lest to say, the girl that bombed her exam has to retry all of the 3 bar exams spending quite some cash and if she fails the bar again, she's banned from becomming an MD for life. I came to watch the oral bar exam a few weeks ago as an observer and knew almost all of the answers (I would have done pretty subpar on one exam because the doctor asking questions made it so damn difficult; but the other 4 exams were quite easy). And I'm not even officially an intern yet. Just shows that the bar is both a great way to see if you know the stuff or not, if you can control your emotions like a doctor should and that insanely good grades on memorization tests doesn't guarantee you can get the degree. Fail the bar twice and you're out, they don't care if you're #1 in your class.
I sure as hell didn't.
