Whats hilarious is that my attending was actually going though a divorce with her husband during my rotation (great guess!). I think I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was one point away from honors on my shelf exam too. It just pisses me off that one doctor can break your deans letter.
I spoke with the secretary that complies my deans letter, and she essentially said it was up to the dean to trim it down if he wanted to. Could go either way on this one.
Very interesting comments above from aProgDir about how some schools don't edit their dean's letters and state this. Obviously this would be bad for some students, such as the OP. For example, say you are stuck with an attending who isn't good evaluating students objectively or is going through a hard time or has a bad reaction to someone who IS on their game and wants to just slap them down.
Obviously a lot of attendings have big egos which are also fragile and will put horrible comments in evaluations, sometimes with some regularity.
Why do deans allow attendings known to write harsh comments, sometimes unjustified do this? Is it a desire to be honest and have a "fair process"? Not likely as often such attendings make unjustified comments about other students or it is obvious that this is not reflective of the student's entire performance.
Rather it is because some medical schools are really hard up for having clinical instructors teach their medicine, peds etc . . . clerkships and basically have a "hands off" policy when it comes to correcting overly harsh evaluations based more on emotion. Your school maybe one such school where the clinical instructors really don't like the students and throw up their hands in dispair every evaluation cycle and slam students. Many of the top medical schools have really excellent faculty-student interaction where if a student isn't "learning enough" things are ironed out before the end of the clerkship. Other schools couldn't care less and have faculty retention problems and can't hire nice faculty.
Chances are good that your dean doesn't want to anger this said attending/clerkship director, and would rather leave your MSPE untouched, i.e. less work, and everybody is happy except for you who will leave for residency in a year or so.
My advice:
1. Talk to the dean directly, i.e. sit down and ask just what the procedure is when a student is concerned about apparently outlier comments in the dean's letter. Look at the specifics to see if there is anything that is exaggerated or false and ask it to be removed.
2. 100% ask for your shelf exam score AND good evaluations in said clerkship to be included in your dean's letter. Your dean won't want to do this as it shows how uneven the grading and evaluation is in this course.
Believe me, if 25 students had the same problem you had the dean would change things, but they let attendings go "student hunting" and knock off a couple of students each cycle for good measure, i.e. you are the fall guy (gal?) and while they may care about how a majority of their students do in relation to other schools, they care much less about the individual student as a person.
If you are lucky your dean will look into this and help portray your experience in the clerkship more accurately. And apply early for residency and you will get a ton of interviews before the dean's letter goes out.
