<p>" am guessing that modules are the same as blocks???
anyway…the students are told what quartile they are in after each exam."
-I am guessing the same. So, at p/f Med. School, everybody is at the same standing after first 2 pre-clinical years - they all have passed (even if it took them couple tries). That was my original point - nobody knows. Then in clinicals, your shelf exams are either considered a bit or not so much. Evals are primary source of your grade. And if you happen to be at place where people do not care to fill those evals (even shortened on-line version) and this fact is absolutely known to everybody including the person in charge who is determinning the final grade, but he does not care, then you are screwed, no matter what is your shelf exam score. One of D’s friend did very well according to everybody around, worked extremely hard, but was unable to “suck out” good number of evals, got “commendable”. Faught it, only to be told that everybody knows the situation, all knew that she did absolutely nothing wrong, worked hard and deserves much better, but nothing they could do, simply not enough evals. This was not anyhow specific to this student, everybody there has the same experience. Maybe they make exception to people who are actually pursuing this specialty. But the fact remains and my D. is there currently and pretty much ready to face the same, while being much more aggressive than her “normal” character in all her requests including participation. She mentioned that if she was not, then she would be left sitting in a corner. I told her, just make sure not to knock anybody down the floor, using your elbows. What one can do but joke about this, while it is not a laughable at all. The whole situation with evals is very subjective and completely un-standardized. One might just get very unlucky with the eval written by somebody who simply happen to be in a bad mood. </p>
<p>…again, Research and out-patient rotation are basically “break” times. I just mentioned to D. yesterday how her 3rd year is 16 months long with very few short breaks. Her repply was that she had 2 2-months long breaks - her 4 months research that she has broken down into 2 periods to have 2 breaks. And that is when she is the one who actually is running the whole project, written very long manuscript, created a poster and still very much involved and working with several people to finish it even now. </p>