Thanks for advice. Looking at the US exams, I am starting to feel that the first two years in a British medical school is hopeless at preparing us for the clinical years. The British system is not centralised enough, every medical school is allowed to set their own exams, under the watchful eye of the medical educational government body. Obviously this means that we do not all sit the same exam. Of course this is fairly normal practice for degree subjects and medicine is no exception, except that our shift towards problem based learning, where our learning objectives for the semester are extracted from a series of clinical case studies, one for each week, has created significant gaps in our core scientific knowledge.
It is such a stupid system that lets their students define their own curriculmn in the belief that it will match up with what the examiners have in mind for us based on a few ques in a clinical case. Speaking from experience, it doesn't and I wish they would realise that! Looking through the questions in the Qbook, I cannot answer any of them and neither can my bright med school friends. The fact that our US counterparts are so far ahead of us in the first two years is embarrassing and proof that my concerns are perfectly legitimate. Furthermore, since the pointers (ques in the case study) are fairly weak in respect to defining the extent of knowledge that is required to complete a learning objective, many of us spend wasted hours reviewing books like Guytons which is very detailed and certainly not that clinically relevant in many parts.
Things do tend to sort themselves out during the clinical years (years 3 to 5) Regardless of whether things get better, wasting the first two years of medical school is still a travesty and wouldn't happen if the curriculmn was set by the government and we knew what to revise.
Oh well that is enough moaning, its late and I'm tired.
