<p>in this book, the writers put median MCAT scores for each school rather than averages. how should i interpret this? should i stay away from schools that have higher medians than the average or lower than the average?</p>
<p>A median and a mean are both central measures (measures of the center of a data distribution). Some (the MSAR) hold that medians are more useful; some prefer means (USN). A school with a higher mean than median implies that on balance, the extreme high points (the +5's) outnumber the extreme low points (the -5's). Schools that have a mean and median which are very close imply that the distribution is relatively symmetric.</p>
<p>I have no idea why you would want to avoid one or the other, as I can't imagine that this actually affects the quality of the school or your own experience.</p>
<p>(By the way, it's perhaps better to use the term "mean" rather than "average", which can be slightly ambiguous sometimes.)</p>
<p>there are only like, what, 233 medical schools in the country? All of them are pretty good. The differences in the medical schools are the little tweaks they have in the curriculum...as in, a couple medical schools finish all the basic sciences after 1.5 years instead of 2, so you can have an extra semester for clinical rotations (Baylor College of Medicine is the example that comes to mind). Find the medical schools with the teaching styles that you think are the neatest.</p>
<p>cheers!</p>
<p>126 MD programs. Penn also spends 1.5 years, and Duke spends 1 year.</p>
<p>Finishing basic science in 18 months to allow an extra six months of clinical rotations is an attractive concept in theory, but the 33% increase in work rate is going to make a daunting process even more intense. (Remember, summer vacation in medical school is much shorter than as an undergraduate.)</p>
<p>At Duke, at least, they omit considerably to help them avoid excessive compression - they leave out subjects that they haven't found to be useful e.g. embryology.</p>
<p>Actually my summer vacation was technically a week longer than I had in undergrad. Granted, we had a comprehensive exam over the entire first year (I believe we are the only med school in the country to do that) 10 days after our last exam, but I really only studied for about 3 days for that b/c you only had to pass (get w/i at least 2 STD's of the mean for the last three years...hooray for only having to get a 42% for Anatomy!).</p>
<p>There are several different curriculum types throughout medical education: some are the traditional take 5 classes a semester just like you would in undergrad. My school is on a "core" system, where we take a combination of associated subjects every day for either 10 or 6 weeks (M1 cores are Structure of the Human Body - 10 weeks; Cellular Processes - 6 weeks; Function of the Human Body - 10 weeks; Neurosciences - 6 weeks). Other schools do an entirely Problem Based Learning system in which small groups of students basically follow a hypothetical clinical case and teach each other the material.</p>
<p>the problem based learning seems like you'd get a somewhat incoherent and jumbled education. Bigredmed, do you that programs with only problem based learning are as effective as traditional medical teaching?</p>
<p>Schools that exclusively use PBL are becoming rarer, probably for the reason you just described. I know several schools that have introduced it radically and then backed away to using it somewhat (UCSF, for example). Most schools do at least a little bit - I can only think of one offhand that doesn't use any (Pritzker) and I only know of one that uses it completely (Southern Illinois, or so rumors say).</p>
<p>Well it's used at places like Harvard for their New Pathway program.
Missouri-Columbia also uses an adapted PBL curriculum in which most time is dedicated to student paced learning...</p>
<p>I'm not sure exactly where else this is used quite as extensively as those two schools. My own school incorporates the problem based learning sessions too, usually 5 hours of core time per exam is spent doing those (5 hours scheduled over three sessions, most groups finish much more quickly).</p>