What's ridiculous is your argument. The classes are 50 minutes long with a break between so you can go to the bathroom, or get water, or run grab a bite. But, because they don't have food and drunk spilled all over the place the cost of maintenance and replacement is much lower. That's one reason why tuition is lower than any other private school. If you can't handle waiting 50 minutes for food and water, then you don't have to go there. Its that simple. Many of us have the ability to follow the rules without bitching about them. Its something you should try to learn in life. It will make life easier.
As for PBL, as so many have commneted here, students do better on boards over all with PBL because they learn medicine in a clinical context and are tested that way as well. They don't learn micro and physio and biochem separately and, all of a sudden, come to boards and have to synthesize this information they have learned and put it into a clinical context. Every PBL test is just like COMLEX, with a variety of cases and all the subjects mixed into clinical scenarios. Actually, our PBL tests were a LOT like COMLEX-- just harder. If you could pass them, then there's virtually no way you could fail your boards.
You have to do a lot of reading on your own in PBL, but what reading the textbooks does is teaches you the concepts of how things work, rather than memorizing a thousand bullet points from a powerpoint lecture. You learn to read a lot of outside material as well and develop your own sources for things. You become very familiar with a lot of the databases and resources you will be using later in residency, and then as an attending.
I a few years you will be sitting in morning report as a resident, hearing about the cases from the night before and you will find out it is just like PBL all over again. Someone will be presenting a case and you'll have a discussion of differentials and start asking what the lab values were. Someone will present from a study or journal on the same type of illness, and you'll all get "homework" to study up on this problem before tomorrow-- in between your admissions, discharges, rounding, etc.
This is REAL doctors, with medical degrees, learning about medicine from senior residents and attendings. And guess what? It's done just like PBL.
That said, a lot of people are not cut out for PBL. They don't have the discipline. And, schools like LECOM are good at weeding those people out. Many people just "self-select" themselves out of it from the beginning. If you don't think it's for you, then don't do it. But the facts here are that it works. Plain and simple.
