The great thing in most med schools is that there aren't standard grades. Premeds are so obsessed with grades, so it's nice not have to worry about getting an A vs. a B. You'd think that it would make things less competitive, right?
Except where I went to med school, we had: Honors, High Pass, Pass, Low Pass, and Fail. And this grading system seems to be pretty common in med schools.
So... how exactly is this different from A, B, C, D, and F?
On our dean's letter, they rate us: Outstanding, Superior, Excellent, Very Good.
ReplyDeleteSo basically, if you're a Very Good, you're a D student. Those people don't tend to match.
I forgot to add -- Outstanding is for like.... the top 5%, Superior is top 30%, Excellent is 30-70%, Very Good is bottom 30. "Good" is reserved for the students the med school wants to wash its hands of.
DeleteSo yes, very grade-like.
How can you be "Very Good" and essentially a D student? They should just say "not pass" or something like that.
DeleteP = MD. (Pass = MD.) Even the person at the bottom of the class is doctor. Of course, if you fail enough courses, you fail out of med school. It's not like people aren't learning the material and getting MDs.
DeleteP = MD may be true, but in order to match in the specialty of your choice (depending on what that is), you need more than that.
DeleteWe have honors and pass. We also have the above ranking (or a similar one) listed by OMDG. We're a few days away from our first exams and the gunners are showing their true colors. I had no idea what I was in for...
ReplyDeleteYou're right. There is essentially is no difference. If the names A-F were simply changed in standard grading, I believe there would much less obsessing and complaining. That's because the term 'B' has negative connotations of being inferior or insufficient. In fact, my username "B-Rate" is meant to convey mediocrity and low quality. Even though the university catalog will say B = good, most students don't really believe that and don't understand that A's are for the people who truly excel.
ReplyDeleteWe are based on Z score....So Honors, High Pass, Pass, Marginalize, and Fail. All based on the average and standard deviation. Really endorses camaraderie.
ReplyDeleteFor the first two years of med school we are purely pass/fail. There's a numerical cut-off for passing, so it doesn't depend on how anyone else did. I can't tell you how nice it is; really does help camaraderie.
ReplyDeleteJust in case anyone who reads this could do something about it: Why not base the raw scores for Honors, high pass, etc. on the performance of the previous year's class? There would still be competition, but it would be between the gunners in separate years, and the higher level class wouldn't care
ReplyDeleteI can't conceive of how that would work. Presumably the classes are taking different exams, so if one year's exam is much harder than the last year, will everyone just fail?
DeleteI understand your objection, but my school already uses a fixed percent correct for pass, so I was proposing using last year's 85th and 70th percentile for honors and high pass. It is conceivable that no one would get honors, but that would be an unusually large change in test difficulty, since questions are often reused and the new questions are usually reworded old questions.
DeleteWell, why is it better to use last year's grades rather than a fixed percentile every year? If the test doesn't change year to year, that seems to make sense. Using last year's grades seems a little overcomplicated.
DeleteWe are grade based, although it's changing. It's absolute, not based on a curve or Z-score or anything, so at least (theoretically) all of us could score Honors. Doubtful though, haha
ReplyDeleteWe are purely pass/fail. On the detailed evaluations for tutorials and clerkship/elective rotations, we can get "exceeds expectations", "meets", "partially meets", "fails to meet", "unable to assess". Those typically don't get submitted anywhere, and until recently only "strengths" appeared on our Dean's Letters. These have since been re-termed "Medical Student Performance Reports" and evaluators are now instructed that any "concerns" they list will show up on the MSPR.
ReplyDeleteSuffice it to say that matching in Canada is mostly about networking and getting attendings to go to bat for you. Marks are scarcely relevant unless there are failures.
We are Honors (>90%), Near Honors (85-90%), Satisfactory (70-85%), Marginal (60-70%) and Fail (<60%) for all four years. Really marginal is failing, too because we have to get above 70% in all out classes/clerkships to pass them.
ReplyDeleteFor our Dean's Letters, we get put into Quartiles based on grades, with the first two years being weighted 1/3 and the third year being weighted 2/3. So at least our quartiles are based more on clinical performance.
Thankfully the school has a lot of camaraderie/collegiality despite the grades. I think it's the hippie dippie west coast vibe and older than normal average age that saves us, though - not anything to do with grading scales...
My school is pass/fail first two years then honors blah blah blah 3rd year and up. Thank God it's pass/fail at first. Way less competitive.
ReplyDeleteWe're strictly P/F for first, second, and fourth year. Third year we get the typical A-F grades. We don't have any ambiguous wording in our dean's letter about our class rank, but histograms are provided for each clerkship to show where we fall in the class for each. Still, first and second year grades don't get factored in at all; they're merely kept on record to cull the nominations for AOA.
ReplyDeleteTell me about it. We have the same thing. Welll the names are the same. but at the end of the day, they mean the same thing. And on top of that, our school have a distinction sysytem for those who get Honours all along.
ReplyDeleteI'm studying veterinary medicine in the UK. Anything below a 50 is a fail (49.5 gets rounded to a pass), Above 60 is credit and above 70 is distinction.
ReplyDeleteAn average exam distribution:
4 students - 40-49 (resit exam in Aug)
31 - 50-59
42 - 60-69
24 - 70-79
2 - 80-89
My school is Honor/Pass/Fail so that's a little better. I'm just going to aim for pass, and maybe an honor in one course that I'm more interested in.
ReplyDelete