2) This is the USMLE data. While several people have indicated that the education received at these institutions is comparable to the US programs. The statistics show this to not be the case. The report from the NAAHP also found that the US citizens at foreign schools had a lower pass rate than non-US citizens at foreign schools (42% vs 59%) respectively.
http://www.nbme.org/annualreport/2004/usmle.htm
To the poster of the above:
Given the fact that the pass rate for USMLE is so low I would seriously question anyone who implies that the education received at carribbean medical schools is near the same level of US programs. I would argue that it is much lower.
I have several friends in carribbean programs and so I am not without respect to their choices. However, sentimentality should never trump pragmatism and scientific methods when giving serious assessments/opinions.[/QUOTE]
I hardly think relating a large, heterogenous group of people, i.e. people from all foreign schools, and using the numbers from the sites you've listed above as an example shows a grasp of scientific method, let alone 'pragmatism'.
I went to SGU and my class had a 92% pass rate. PERIOD. All schools are not the same. Howard Univ. (what's their pass rate?) is not Harvard, nor is SUNY Downstate (pass rate?) the Univ. of Michigan. There are apporoximately 17,000 available seats in US medical schools, and perhaps 30,000 applicants. There is no way to say that only those 17,000 are the one and only perfectly qualified students to be picked. There are maybe 5,000 that simply could not be picked, no more than simply being at the wrong end of the flip of a coin.
My class had 250 students. 20 of them I wouldn't let near my family, nor anyone else. I rotated in NYC with SUNY and Cornell students, several of which I wouldn't let near my family pet. The top 100 in my class were incredibly smart and had simply found a way to be lost in the mix, no fault of their application, their grades, or their MCAT scores. The next 75 had some event, or blip in their past that made them slip...a bad grade freshman year, an illness, or some other inane thing that kept them from being shiny enough to catch the admission committee's attention. I guarantee that if the US schools admitted the number of physicians this country truly needs most of my class would have been US students.
I can't speak for any other schools, US or Caribbean, only for St. George's. We recieved a stellar 2 years of basic science. We were challenged to do well or go the hell home. There's no magic to learning the basic sciences. You get fed the material and you regurgitate it appropriately. You learn to interact clinically and integrate the things you've learned. We had clear instruction by professors who've been doing it for many years, mostly in the US. We had an excellent set of hospitals in the US that made it easy to stay at one hospital for two years, getting to know clincal faculty and making good contacts and get excellent letters of recommendation. My class did extremely well in the match, with surgery, emergency medicine, and radiology residencies.
Some Caribbean schools may be shams, others simply inferior with inferior students I'm sure. But to group all together based on the statistics used by this poster shows that bias is usually based upon ignorance, ignorance perhaps a result of something more ominous in someone who we should perhaps assume is smart enough to either be in medical school or already finished.
