Didn’t read most of the thread, but as a resident I’m frequently asked to provide supplementary feedback for students that appeal their clerkship grade.
What I can tell you from my experience is that rarely has an appeal worked in their favor, at least in terms of the comments that I provide to the clerkship director. At best, the comments I provide support the grade they received. At worst I provide damning comments that may support a grade lower than what they received. With very few exceptions, most of the students I’ve provided supplementary feedback about seem pretty oblivious to their shortcomings, even when provided direct feedback by me or the attending during the rotation. They fail to incorporate the feedback into their practice, thus they get dumped on when they get their evaluation.
Personally, I think the whole idea of requesting a grade appeal is ludicrous from the get-go - I had never heard of this until I got into residency, and the students here request them like nothing else. Unless something completely egregious happened, I don’t think engaging in the appeal process is worth your while, and it potentially demonstrates lack of insight into your own performance. By “egregious” I don’t mean “I didn’t receive the grade I thought I should” - that’s evident, and clearly you weren’t performing at the whatever level (reasonable or not) the attending expected you to.
In terms of your comments,
@neoexile, the problem is that a lot of what playing this “game” successfully about is being able to understand a situation and figuring out what to do in that situation, asking your residents/attendings what is expected of you, and doing every single one of those things to the best your ability. I completely agree with what
@Psai said: watch what your residents are doing, do that, and figure out how to be useful to your team. As absurd as it seems, I can’t tell you how many students fail to do even basic tasks that I clearly explain to them and outline as expectations. It’s incredible. As an example, on an inpatient rotation we had a list of the patients with basic clinical info (diagnoses, current medications, overnight events, vitals, etc.) that was distributed to the team in the morning. The medical students were expected to keep this list up to date. I would spend about half an hour explaining to them what was expected, where to find the information, etc. at the start of the rotation and provide feedback each day if things were missing, information was incorrect, etc.. In spite of this, a good half of the students were incapable of performing this basic task correctly. Many of the students completely ignored feedback that I would give them. This happens all the time in a variety of situations.
Apart from doing these tasks myself, I don’t know how else I can possibly do everything I can to help students succeed. I’m quite empathetic to medical students because I remember going through this bull**** and I want the clerkship experience to be as non-stressful and useful as possible. Some students are seemingly incapable of doing this for themselves. I do everything I can to help make the students look good, teach as much as I possibly can, and provide tips to doing well. Again, despite me giving this information, a surprising number of students seemingly refuse to use this information and do their own thing. I have no idea why the f they do this, but it happens all the time.
Don’t be one of those students.