Well, thanks for not flaming me
You were one of the ones who helped me with Predents.com a while back, so I know you're a nice guy as well. If I offended you about your school, I appologize.
I also agree with you 110% about "teaching" and "learning" when it comes to test taking. IMO, the instructors presence in the classroom serves only to indiacte to me what to emphasize in order to get a high score on the upcoming test. There are few exceptions: My pathology teacher was awesome and I actually listened and learned a lot from him. Our director of OMFS was also an amazing lecturer but besides those, I would have been better off in my room studying PP slides.
The NBDE part 1 is even a better example of teaching yourself, so I agree with you here as well.
Here's my beef, (correct me if I'm wrong since I only saw one PBL session @ USC). Don't other students in your class dig up and teach different parts of a subject to the rest of the PBL group? If thats true, I just wouldn't trust someone else with the info, I'd just go look it all up and study that, so it seems like its just a waste of time. I say, give me a book and tell me when the test is.
I would say that 95% of the time students are not teaching other students the material "directly." We don't sit around the table and let little Jimmy with his history degree teach us about the life cycle of the 4 different malaria viruses. Instead, we (the group) trust that little Jimmy can use a few of his brain cells to look up the information and copy and paste that information into a word document, write a brief summary or highlight a few of the key points and put his name and a title on the paper and e-mail it out to the rest of the group members. It is then the job of each group member to read the material (check the references to make sure the material is legit - 99% of the time it is) and digest it yourself. If you have questions, you bring them to the table during pre-session and you hash it out as a group and the majority of the time the group will solve the problem, which is the point of the process. The case is only really relevant to our learning because it gives us a situation to relate all of the material we've researched.
It's not a difficult process and it definitely doesn't work well for all subjects (namely anatomy and immunology). We take a gross Head and Neck course with cadavers and lectures so that problem is solved, but the immunology is not covered well at all and it's a difficult subject on top of everything else. However, the process works really well for physiology, pathology, microbiology, dental issues, public health, epidemiology, and a few others.
Anyways, PBL is not the problem at USC. Many pre-dents who are blind and oblivious to almost everything like to think this is and will be the demise of this institution; however, 100% of the problems relate solely to the clinic and its operations. These issues have been highlighted a thousand times on these boards and are being addressed at the school. The dean expects a 96%+ on-time graduation rate this year (optimistic, but certainly doable).
Now, let me address one more thing. If you are a pre-dental student I want to remind you of something, and this is extremely important so open your eyes and read what I've written carefully. Specializing has nothing to do with your dental school and anyone who tries to tell you differently is delusional.
Your dental school, the name, the location, the endowment size, the class size play absolutely NO ROLE in your admissions to a specialty program. Besides the 3% of cases of nepotism you can be confident that if you do well at your d-school you WILL specialize. Now you're probably thinking, what in the hell is this guy talking about, look at Harvard, every damn student specializes there. Open your eyes kids, Harvard did not get them in, they got themselves in by doing well on their boards, doing externships, volunteering in the pedo clinic, research, stellar grades, etc. The school did not get them in. End of discussion.
So, when you are asking about "specialty rates" ask yourself how this information is going to help you. Why does it matter that 30% of the class is specializing. All this means is that 30% of the class worked their butts off to do well and match to a program. It has absolutely NO REFLECTION on the dental school they attended.
Merry Christmas!
