Pass/Fail Curriculum vs. Traditional Grades

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You can't google the schools you're interested in? You're already accepted, so you should have already known this about the school(s) you've interviewed at.

Many schools are moving to P/F as it doesn't foster a competitive environment, which medicine should not be.
 
OP, as I implied in my above post, grading scale doesn't really make a difference when class rank comes into play. Almost no med schools have a system wherein there is no class rank, but you ought to be asking which schools implement class rank at the latest time and when in order to get the most accurate answers in terms of your question.
 
ditritium monoxide said:
Not according to what I've heard from people who go there. Can you post a link verifying this?

Also does MCG do class rank all four years?
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I attend MCG right now as an M1 and I assure you that it is P/F first year. They have been doing it this way for a couple of years now. http://www.premedmag.org/2015/05/03/georgia-reagents-university-mcg-medical-school-interview/ You can also email Dean Bauza and ask her directly as the first year dean. I would love to know who your friends are because if they are in my class or the class above me they know who I am IRL and they know my feelings about lying to pre-meds.

MCG ranks only the last three. The first year is not ranked. Your friends should know that as well.
 
familyaerospace said:
I attend MCG right now as an M1 and I assure you that it is P/F first year. They have been doing it this way for a couple of years now. http://www.premedmag.org/2015/05/03/georgia-reagents-university-mcg-medical-school-interview/ You can also email Dean Bauza and ask her directly as the first year dean. I would love to know who your friends are because if they are in my class or the class above me they know who I am IRL and they know my feelings about lying to pre-meds.

MCG ranks only the last three. The first year is not ranked. Your friends should know that as well.
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They aren't friends. Just acquaintances I spoke to more than a year ago, so perhaps things have changed. Thanks a bunch nonetheless.
 
I've heard from med students that pass/fail is less stressful
 
Theafoni said:
I've heard from med students that pass/fail is less stressful
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Many med students say this

only to find out that their particular school actually takes down class rank later on, and thus they are in for a surprise when it comes to match time.

In other words, P/F is only less stressful in the MS years that rank is not recorded.
 
@MagentaKarma , you've really posted a flurry haven't you? Congrats on your acceptances, I hope all goes well.

@AirplaneFruit , as far as I can tell, rankings are what determine AOA. This is essentially the med school honor society that has a higher rate of acceptances at first choice matches than non-AOA. Rankings really don't matter beyond AOA as far as my pre-med knowledge can take me. Your step-1 score determines what is possible in terms of specialty, ranking and AOA is just icing on the cake. Even P/F schools have ranking.
 
MagentaKarma said:
What schools offer pass/fail grading vs. traditional grading? Which is preferable?
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Anecdotally, a true pass fail curriculum (no internal ranking) is an excellent way to go. My preclinical years were true P/F and it was really low stress, in that I decided how much effort I wanted to put in based on goals I set for myself. In third year I've been feeling the pressure a lot more, and I attribute a lot of that to the fact that I'm now graded against my peers. Having that in the first two years of school would have made them much less enjoyable.

mistafab said:
@AirplaneFruit , as far as I can tell, rankings are what determine AOA. This is essentially the med school honor society that has a higher rate of acceptances at first choice matches than non-AOA. Rankings really don't matter beyond AOA as far as my pre-med knowledge can take me. Your step-1 score determines what is possible in terms of specialty, ranking and AOA is just icing on the cake. Even P/F schools have ranking.[/USER]
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AOA is determined differently at each school. True class ranking may play a part at some, and clerkship performance weighs heavily in all, but there are a number of other factors that come into play (ex: service, leadership, research involvement/publications). Class rank will factor into your competitiveness as an applicant for residency, as it gives program directors a general idea about where you stand compared to graduates they have previously seen from your school. The relative weight of your rank will vary and seems to take a back seat to other parts of your application. See the Program Director Survey for information regarding what metrics PD's use to judge applicants, broken down by specialty: http://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/PD-Survey-Report-2014.pdf
 
ditritium monoxide said:
Many med students say this

only to find out that their particular school actually takes down class rank later on, and thus they are in for a surprise when it comes to match time.

In other words, P/F is only less stressful in the MS years that rank is not recorded.
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Most schools that do true P/F do so only for the first two years, and then do standard rankings for 3rd and 4th year. This is pretty well understood concept... I've never met a med student who thought that 3rd year was going to just be P/F, AOA and what not has to be determined somewhere.
 
I just can't see myself working as hard under P/F as I would under traditional grades. I would guess most people feel likewise. It's just too easy to let your guard down with P/F.....
 
familyaerospace said:
I attend MCG right now as an M1 and I assure you that it is P/F first year. They have been doing it this way for a couple of years now. http://www.premedmag.org/2015/05/03/georgia-reagents-university-mcg-medical-school-interview/ You can also email Dean Bauza and ask her directly as the first year dean. I would love to know who your friends are because if they are in my class or the class above me they know who I am IRL and they know my feelings about lying to pre-meds.

MCG ranks only the last three. The first year is not ranked. Your friends should know that as well.
Click to expand...

But the 1st year has quartiles, doesn't it?
 
sandstorm223 said:
I just can't see myself working as hard under P/F as I would under traditional grades. I would guess most people feel likewise. It's just too easy to let your guard down with P/F.....
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Trust me. From what I've heard, passing takes effort. All A marks are likely unattainable.
 
sandstorm223 said:
I just can't see myself working as hard under P/F as I would under traditional grades. I would guess most people feel likewise. It's just too easy to let your guard down with P/F.....
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I guess it depends on what motivates you. Most of my classmates realized that although we are P/F in our preclinical classes, we are still held accountable for all that information, and more, when it comes time for Step 1. Having that test looming in the background, especially during 2nd year, was all the motivation I needed to study hard. Working in a P/F curriculum allows you to focus on the most relevant bits of each class and spend less time on the overwhelming amount of minutiae that some of the professors will throw your way.
 
Being graded isn't the greatest but it really doesn't matter much in my opinion. You're still going to be compared against your peers. Your knowledge base will reflect on step 1 and in your clinical scores during third year. So the things that matter are still graded except at Yale where they're true pass/fail for all 4 years unless they've changed it.
 
Psai said:
Being graded isn't the greatest but it really doesn't matter much in my opinion. You're still going to be compared against your peers. Your knowledge base will reflect on step 1 and in your clinical scores during third year.
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Completely agree. I don't think P/F is nearly as important as pre-allo makes it out to be.
 
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I attend a school with true P/F for MS-1, and although it takes a little bit of pressure off in terms of not having to compete with your peers, most medical students are so Type A that they will study very hard regardless. Our pass cutoff is 75-80% depending on the course, but the exam averages are usually >90%.
 
Glandzburg said:
I attend a school with true P/F for MS-1, and although it takes a little bit of pressure off in terms of not having to compete with your peers, most medical students are so Type A that they will study very hard regardless. Our pass cutoff is 75-80% depending on the course, but the exam averages are usually >90%.
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You have true pass/fail but your tests have numbered grades? I am skeptical about this.
 
Psai said:
You have true pass/fail but your tests have numbered grades? I am skeptical about this.
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Student Services emphasizes that as long as you pass 1st year, it absolutely will not be reflected anywhere on your residency application. Scores are kept track of so that students can gauge their performance with respect to their peers. This is helpful so you can determine if you need to step it up during second year to reach your goals, as second year is graded A-F. Second year grades are the sole metric for pre-clinical "class rankings."

I think it's nice to at least know what quartile you are in, rather than being blind-sided in second year when the real rankings start.
 
Psai said:
Being graded isn't the greatest but it really doesn't matter much in my opinion. You're still going to be compared against your peers. Your knowledge base will reflect on step 1 and in your clinical scores during third year. So the things that matter are still graded except at Yale where they're true pass/fail for all 4 years unless they've changed it.
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Yale is H/HP/P/F during clinicals, but there is no AOA and they said on interview day probably 70% of students get honors each rotation. There are no grades at all preclinical.

Psai said:
You have true pass/fail but your tests have numbered grades? I am skeptical about this.
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My school also has numbered grades per test, but is true P/F preclinical. The numbered scores, beyond the pass threshold, are for our own purposes. We aren't ranked until our clinicals.
 
sandstorm223 said:
I just can't see myself working as hard under P/F as I would under traditional grades. I would guess most people feel likewise. It's just too easy to let your guard down with P/F.....
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If your motivation do do well in medical school is grades you likely won't be great in school. The purpose is to learn as much as you can. Not to hit some threshold. You need this so the motivation translates to practicing when there are no grades. So believe me when I say P/F is great because it lets you worry more about learning than grades.
 
Whether they tell you that they count your grades or not doesn't change your motivation. A lot of people are motivated to be the best doctor they can and study hard. Good grades aren't the goal, they're a reflection of your effort. Everyone knows that people don't really look at preclinical grades beyond whether or not you're aoa. If it makes you feel better to think that you're spectacular for the pure motivation underlying your learning, more power to you. It really doesn't matter.

I will never forget the post I saw years ago by somebody who talked about how his school sent him a secret email congratulating him for scoring in the top in the class at his supposedly true pass/fail school. I wish I could find it.
 
Psai said:
I will never forget the post I saw years ago by somebody who talked about how his school sent him a secret email congratulating him for scoring in the top in the class at his supposedly true pass/fail school. I wish I could find it.
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Yeah, it's really starting to seem that a lot of med schools are a bit deceiving with this pass/fail thing. The optimal strategy for preclinical performance might be to try and go to a true pass/fail school but behave as if its graded.
 
Just because a school is keeping track of and informing you of your relative performance does not mean that the information will be used against you in any way. It is simply to let you know how you are doing. Most students appreciate having an idea of where they fall within their class, even in true P/F systems. I highly doubt there are P/F schools out there that just mark a "P" by your name and then burn the evidence.
 
Glandzburg said:
Just because a school is keeping track of and informing you of your relative performance does not mean that the information will be used against you in any way. It is simply to let you know how you are doing. Most students appreciate having an idea of where they fall within their class, even in true P/F systems. I highly doubt there are P/F schools out there that just mark a "P" by your name and then burn the evidence.
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Then quite honestly, every student is being "ranked" in some way, and this will be reflected, perhaps indirectly and maybe even psychologically, when rec letters are written for residency apps, regardless of what schools say about the "trueness" of their p/f system.
 
cloudmurder1 said:
Then quite honestly, every student is being "ranked" in some way, and this will be reflected, perhaps indirectly and maybe even psychologically, when rec letters are written for residency apps, regardless of what schools say about the "trueness" of their p/f system.
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Sorry to burst your conspiracy bubble, but your rank from first year is not available to the letter writers. It is TRUE pass/fail, and will NOT affect you in any way.
 
I dont get the logic here. The goal is to learn and the best way to learn is to not have grades? If you are learning more you get a higher grade. That is the point of numbers.

P/F is just a mechanism so there is less stress on the student.
 
MagentaKarma said:
What schools offer pass/fail grading vs. traditional grading? Which is preferable?
Click to expand...


If you've already interviewed, you should know and if not, I'll let you do that research. In terms of which is preferable, it's really a mixed bag. First of all, everyone will be graded more in depth than pass/fail come clinical years so the question becomes pass/fail vs honors/pass/fail vs honors/high pass/pass/fail.

Pass/Fail:

Pros:


1. For the TRULY self motivated student, this is the best option as it gives a student a great opportunity to prepare for Step right from the start instead of worrying about class grades.


2. I guarantee that every interview I went to said that atmosphere is great, no one's competitive, etc. but that's all bull. If you go to a true pass/fail school, you'll experience the best atmosphere.


Cons:

1.The less-than-average student may continually be caught in the mindset of nothing counts until step and study with mediocrity until the end of the second year and never catch up in time to do well on step.

2. Kind of related to the first point, but you get lulled into a false sense of security. Competition for residencies is brutal if you're looking for something competitive and if you're not the best of students, it may be helpful to get a kick in the butt at the beginning so you can learn to work harder.


Honors/Pass/Fail:

Pros: You can distinguish yourself with honors.

Cons:

1. while it seems like this is the perfect compromise, it's really not. First of all, most schools that apply this system ARE ACTUALLY NOT WHAT THEY SEEM. In actuality, it's honors/class-rank/fail where your class rank is kept on record and will always be kept track of and your bracket (top 10,25,50 bottom 50, etc) will be recorded and carried with you all the way to fellowship applications if you choose to go that far. "OH, that's impossible, they told us on interview day it's honors/pass/fail...ya most of my friends at other schools and classmates thought the same thing.

2. Everyone's an undercover gunner. Obviously people in med school are generally good people so there's no foul play (not like there can be anyways with electronic resources). If you ask students questions, they'll deff help you out, but the thing is that everyone will be striving for honors every exam and the competition can get exhausting and in the end, you realize that most of your hard work is meaningless in that it's not even applicable stuff you're learning.

3. The competition gets to the point where you can't effectively run meaningful student organizations or have the curriculum be less focused on MC exams because everyone's studying all the time.

4 valuable step time will be taken to memorize internal school minutiae.

Honors/High Pass/Pass/Fail

Pro: Atleast going forward you know what you're going into. This system is pretty old and I'd imagine pretty ratre.

Con: most of the cons from the last one apply here.
 
7331poas said:
I dont get the logic here. The goal is to learn and the best way to learn is to not have grades? If you are learning more you get a higher grade. That is the point of numbers.

P/F is just a mechanism so there is less stress on the student.
Click to expand...

Agreed for the most part but you have to admit, there's is a lot of minutiae that some schools focus on that is irrelevant to boards. This is especially prevalent in schools with a traditional curriculum.
 
AirplaneFruit said:
Wait so how important are rankings compared to Step scores?
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There are papers published on this kind of stuff but, from my understanding, here is a breakdown.

Tier 1 factors:

1. Clerkship grades
2. Step 1/2 score
3. Letters of Recommentation

Tier 2 factors:

Student publication.
Class rank (combination of everything, for example, maybe it's 20% M1, 20% M2, and 10% Step 1, 25% M3, etc)
Interview performance

Tier 3 factors:

Extra curriculum activities
Pre-clinical grades (but note that this is still factored into class rank)
 
Backtothebasics8 said:
Agreed for the most part but you have to admit, there's is a lot of minutiae that some schools focus on that is irrelevant to boards. This is especially prevalent in schools with a traditional curriculum.
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....Isnt this directly against your supposed goal of P/F? You say P/F is a system which allows people to learn better. Now you are telling me that P/F is just a mechanism which allows you to skip material that you deem important or not (which is the exact opposite).

I think my problem boils down to the mentality of the classic premed who constant asks in class "will this be on the test"?
 
7331poas said:
....Isnt this directly against your supposed goal of P/F? You say P/F is a system which allows people to learn better. Now you are telling me that P/F is just a mechanism which allows you to skip material that you deem important or not (which is the exact opposite).

I think my problem boils down to the mentality of the classic premed who constant asks in class "will this be on the test"?
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You are misunderstanding. It's not about what YOU deem to be important, it's about what is important to know for Step 1. Professors love to throw in extra details that they happen to be knowledgeable about, but that may be irrelevant for boards. In schools that are graded, you have to use valuable time to memorize that minutiae instead of focusing on what the National Board of Medical Examiners wants you to know.
 
7331poas said:
I dont get the logic here. The goal is to learn and the best way to learn is to not have grades? If you are learning more you get a higher grade. That is the point of numbers.

P/F is just a mechanism so there is less stress on the student.
Click to expand...
Wrong. There is a correlation, sure, but in medical school it isn't that simple. There is simply SO MUCH to learn that no test is close to indicative of how much you learned. I could learn 1800/2000 topics for a given three week unit and if 50/100 questions come from the 200 I didn't learn? Well the grade won't reflect it but I still learned the content very well. Testing has limits. The quicker you realize that the easier your life will be. I'm much more secure in knowing if I get an 80 I did fine and all that learning I did wasn't worthless due to not getting an A.
 
claduva94 said:
Wrong. There is a correlation, sure, but in medical school it isn't that simple. There is simply SO MUCH to learn that no test is close to indicative of how much you learned. I could learn 1800/2000 topics for a given three week unit and if 50/100 questions come from the 200 I didn't learn? Well the grade won't reflect it but I still learned the content very well. Testing has limits. The quicker you realize that the easier your life will be. I'm much more secure in knowing if I get an 80 I did fine and all that learning I did wasn't worthless due to not getting an A.
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Quicker I realize what? That you dont understand statistics? Your logic would follow if there was only 1 test for the whole 2 years of M1 and M2.

Do you think that people who score significantly worse on the STEP simply got unlucky?
 
Glandzburg said:
You are misunderstanding. It's not about what YOU deem to be important, it's about what is important to know for Step 1. Professors love to throw in extra details that they happen to be knowledgeable about, but that may be irrelevant for boards. In schools that are graded, you have to use valuable time to memorize that minutiae instead of focusing on what the National Board of Medical Examiners wants you to know.
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Not sure I get it. How is that not, "Will this be on the test?" mentality?
 
Our school and others have found the pre-clinical GPA is an excellent predictor of how students do on Boards. So a traditional grading system allows us to have a diagnostic well before a complacent student can fail Step I.
 
7331poas said:
Not sure I get it. How is that not, "Will this be on the test?" mentality?
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I suppose you are right. But what is your alternative? Memorize all the minutiae about each professor's research that you will never actually need to know in practice? Good luck with that, you'll have to spend all your free time studying, and you'll likely burn out very quickly.

Or do you think maybe it's a better idea to focus on the information that the national accrediting bodies deems necessary for you to know? And maybe to focus on an exam that will determine your entire career?

The thing about medical school is that it is NOT undergrad. You cannot just memorizing every little detail the professor presents to you like you could in undergrad. There is not enough time in the day. But at schools that are not pass/fail, you will always be trying to cram more of that minutiae into your head so that you can get a good class rank. Not a good use of your time.

In short, students at schools with grades are studying with the mindset "will this be on THIS relatively insignificant exam?" While students in P/F schools can ask the smarter question "will this be on the most important exam of my life thus far?"
Which sounds better to you?
 
Goro said:
Our school and others have found the pre-clinical GPA is an excellent predictor of how students do on Boards. So a traditional grading system allows us to have a diagnostic well before a complacent student can fail Step I.
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And this is exactly why they keep track of our scores, even if we aren't graded. It's helpful to know how you are doing relative to your classmates.
 
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