<p>How hard is med school really? Is it exaggerated?</p>
<p>Well considering the amount of work you needed just to get into Medical School and the fact that a patient's life is literally in your hands, I'm more than sure that Medical Schools will really prepare their students; and by that I mean very rigorous courses.</p>
<p>is medical like college, 1 or 2 exams are your only grds?</p>
<p>Well considering that I'm the only one currently in medical school on this board I guess this is up to me.</p>
<p>Let me start by saying the jump from HS to college is a big one (and I think everyone will agree), and the jump to medical school is just as big - at least in my opinion. </p>
<p>Again this is just my opinion, and how it has been for me, but here is why it's difficult:</p>
<p>It's really not that the material is that much different or raised a level in difficulty, but the speed and the volume is really amped up a lot. There is no down time in medical school - no days where a prof will show you a video, no "taking it easy" because you had a test last week. If I miss a lecture, I'm listening to it online later that night or that week. We have saturday tests at my school, and most fridays we're still in lecture for four hours for material we're going to get tested on the next day. It's like trying to drink from a firehose. </p>
<p>My grade is based on how well I do compared to my classmates, and so a lot of our questions I think are meant to separate us out. Otherwise we would all be scoring extremely high if it was just the general concepts and major details. Meaning that the depth of details you need to do well is that much greater. Medical school has been the first time in my life where everyone there is either a) as smart as I am, b) smarter than me, or c)not as smart as me, but work a WHOLE lot harder than I do or am used to.</p>
<p>As for tests/grade ratio, my school is on a "core" system, and we average a test every 2.5 to 3 weeks. If we have a 10wk core, there will be 4 tests, and a 6 week core will be 2 tests. We had a short paper (<2pgs) as part of our grade in two cores, but they were very small % of the grade. </p>
<p>One last thing to throw out: all of our exams (particularly our non-science "how to be a doctor" core) contained multiple choice questions in which all the answer choices were technically correct and suitable answers but you have to choose the best answer - very different than most any test you are likely to take before medical school (mainly b/c HS teachers and College profs don't want to have to argue about the choices - in med school they don't give you that option as all tests - or at least the vast majority - will be "secure" meaning your test is destroyed several days after the grade is accurately recorded)</p>
<p>But it's important to point out that there is a lot of variation from school to school in how they grade and test. Creighton, which a lot of my fellow Kaplan teachers attend does things totally different where a 70% is always passing, and there are pluses and minuses to that just like there are pluses and minuses to using the z-score method UNMC does...</p>
<p>As for clinical rotations, a lot the grades are actually deteremined by assessments to how well you work with others. You do have to pass a shelf exam at the end which is a national exam for that specialty area.</p>
<p>I mean, some medical schools are just pass/fail, with fail being two standard deviations below the mean (Northwestern).</p>
<p>And, for the record, my high school was a lot harder than my college.</p>
<p>Yeah, our grading system is honors/high pass/pass/marginal/fail</p>
<p>-1.5 std puts you at risk for a marginal
-2 std puts you at risk for a fail</p>
<p>your actual grade though is determined by the core director, so just becaus you get, say a -1.6, doesn't mean you automatically marginalize.</p>
<p>Bluedevilmike, which college did you go to?</p>
<p>Dude, Blue Devils???</p>
<p>Heh. (Amused)</p>
<p>(It's actually not a comment on my college so much as a comment on my high school.)</p>
<p>what high school you to go to? Exeter, Thomas Jefferson, etc?</p>
<p>I Hate Tim Thomas</p>
<p>you were one of two from 2001-2005 who went to duke?</p>
<p>Yup. We're Californians - biased against the South and all that.</p>
<p>btw, the mean SAT scores for your school is ridiculously high.</p>
<p>I like my high school. =)</p>
<p>bluedevil, i heard about ur school. No wonder u found that harder than duke</p>
<p>freekobe, u kidding me, tim thomas is so good. I love the suns for acquairing him. very sad that suns lost tonight.</p>
<p>wow, more people got into harvard than UCLA!</p>
<p>Well, more people GO to Harvard than UCLA, right. I promise you we get more kids into UCLA than we get into Harvard.</p>
<p>insanity. i never heard of that school and I'm FROM the d a m n state</p>