How does everyone else's school calculate your clerkship grades?
Ours seems to have relatively recently stopped using the weighted average approach and instead has put cut offs that need to be met for 1. clerkship evals, 2. shelf, and 3. standardized patient encounter. You only qualify for Honors or high pass unless you reach the threshold for each. As in even if you demolished the shelf and get fantastic evals from but your single 20 minute standardized patient encounter doesn't go as smooth as you'd like, you still just get a pass. As in, this is exactly what has happened to me.
The standardized patient encounter didn't even go that poorly, it was literally just 1 point below the high pass threshold (and also only 4 points below honors). While it is what it is and I'll move on, I just can't wrap my head around why 1 actors impression of me literally outweighs the sum of every resident, attending and the shelf exam. What's worse is that all through MS2 I did really well on the standardized patient exams, its just that it had literally been 5 months so we'd had one and perhaps was a bit rusty. It's as though all that extra effort I put in and the success I had was for nothing. I feel really demoralized about it but am obviously just going to move on with life and just remember to say "that sounds really hard" every every 3rd sentence during future SPEs instead of focusing too much on their crushing chest pain...
Do other people's schools do this or is this unique to mine?
Ours seems to have relatively recently stopped using the weighted average approach and instead has put cut offs that need to be met for 1. clerkship evals, 2. shelf, and 3. standardized patient encounter. You only qualify for Honors or high pass unless you reach the threshold for each. As in even if you demolished the shelf and get fantastic evals from but your single 20 minute standardized patient encounter doesn't go as smooth as you'd like, you still just get a pass. As in, this is exactly what has happened to me.
The standardized patient encounter didn't even go that poorly, it was literally just 1 point below the high pass threshold (and also only 4 points below honors). While it is what it is and I'll move on, I just can't wrap my head around why 1 actors impression of me literally outweighs the sum of every resident, attending and the shelf exam. What's worse is that all through MS2 I did really well on the standardized patient exams, its just that it had literally been 5 months so we'd had one and perhaps was a bit rusty. It's as though all that extra effort I put in and the success I had was for nothing. I feel really demoralized about it but am obviously just going to move on with life and just remember to say "that sounds really hard" every every 3rd sentence during future SPEs instead of focusing too much on their crushing chest pain...
Do other people's schools do this or is this unique to mine?
