Yes but this is why physicians aren’t allowed to practice without a residency. 3rd year is about getting used to your physical exam, witnessing an abnormal exam, understanding what common pathologies look like in real life, etc. This can really be done in most hospitals in the US (that are bigger than critical access hospitals). 4th year is about beginning to learn management of these pathologies. In a smaller hospital, as long as it’s not a shadowing opportunity, you will still manage all of the common pathologies that are required of students. The problem is when the Student is shadowing because they aren’t learning. The majority of my experiences are the lazy medstudents that want to skate through do not learn what they need to from clinical rotations.
Yet midlevels can practice independently without a residency and they don't even do half of 3rd year med school! Insane, right?
Also I disagree with your expectations of 3rd year. During my rotations (DO school), my grade was tied to how accurately I could diagnose and come up with a plan for a patient, including specific drug dosages. If my plan differed slightly from the attendings, I could defend it to receive credit.
During internal medicine, I was doing 4-7 progress notes per day + 0-8 admissions daily. One outpatient rotation, it was paper scripts so I had to have the patient figured out, assessed, have the plan ready + orders (labs/scripts) written out for the attending to sign off quickly.
I honestly think what I was doing should be average for any 3rd year. I was disappointed that only 2 rotations in ms3 let me put in orders, until I found out no one in ms3 does that and even subIs aren't always doing that.
I think coming into 4th year, you should know how to work up and manage all the common pathologies. 4th year is when you learn more zebras and learn the atypical presentations of horses + learn more in-depth management of lesser common pathology.
What I would consider a robust experience is a mixture of academic center where you see unique pathology + volume & rural/community where you have autonomy and actually place order/make some decisions.
The worst attitude I've seen - is that you should postpone learning XYZ until residency. And this attitude comes from attendings & residents. The residents think that way because of their own poor education in med school. The attendings just don't know any better.
It's so silly that there's this mentality that med students don't need to be doing much and everything just gets dumped on the intern.
I disagree. Even if lazy students abound, which they do, it's not their responsibility to teach themselves. I'm paying 50K+ to be taught medicine. There is no structure, no lecture, no explanations, no direction. That isn't on me. And the idea that it is and that those who don't go out of their way to track down everything makes them "lazy" is contradictory to the idea of school and is a big part of the problem.
Ultimately, when you have so many med schools and so many facilities with med students - you get extreme variability in teaching. Most people are not good teachers. Nor are they understanding of what constitutes a good med student experience.