Oh I'd meant it as a general response ~ to encourage everyone to look beyond attrition rates.
Initially I'd felt the same as a student. woo-hoo. Low drop out rates! then realized by the end it isn't really saying much, as the weeding out process continues through residency years. Just because you'd passed and gotten a degree, it's still survival of the fittest after that. At least here, I have to re-apply for jobs every year until registrar training, that's after I apply and get into registrar training.
There's still moments as an intern when I'm filled with regret over not studying more for some subjects. Nothing worse than, say, me showing up the first day of clinics as an intern for a particular rotation and there's no more shadowing or observing. It's 'this stack of patients is yours. In you go.'
ALso my bad - UQ wasn't as terrible as I'd initially quoted on the IFOM.
"The UQ cohort performed better (31% scored below 500) than the ICG (55% below 500). However 49% of the UQ cohort did not meet the USMLE Step 2 CK minimum score."
At least the abstract and general gist should be available publicly here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/0142159X.2013.849331?journalCode=imte20
I'm not sure what the exact stats are, as they never publicly shared or published the data as promised for the MDANZ. That's the only exam used as a comparative tool across most Australian medical schools (Not all have tried the IFOM). At least not to my knowledge/while I was still in med school. But it wasn't good. That said, no one had any particular motivation to do well anyway.
MDANZ is still being done every year, they change the topic. One year it was Internal Medicine, another year it was Paeds, or Surgery.
So there's also the compounding factor of when students did their respective rotation. If paeds was the previous rotation, they were probably going to do better, if it was ages ago, probably not.
To add to the chatter about comparing the different nationalities in a cohort - it's comparing apples to oranges. As in there's no point to comparing them.
There's also always going to be variability in people let into med schools. Particularly at places without interviews or simply need the money.
Say we're talking about Steps -
In context - the select Canadians who chose to write the Steps do comparatively better than their respective American peers who are forced to do it. That's because not all Canadians will take it, whereas all UQO students are expected to take the Steps, as part of contract. Whereas not all Canadians will, as they don't have any special program. it's just traditional 4 years with the Aussies. Some will also only do the 'EE. Increasingly, some do neither and just try their luck in Australia. There's a skew in that. Obviously, if you're going to invest that much time and money
voluntarily, you're going to be more motivated and high achieving than the rest of the entire cohort essentially. It's thousands of dollars to do the steps and they're 8 hour exams.
Grades-wise, I'd agree with some of the commenters up there.
For the USA and Canada - no one understands Australian grades unless you've attended an Australian med school. Most program directors have probably never been to Australia.
They're left with their standardized exams score relevant to their respective countries, referees (based in those countries) and CVs (leadership, research etc). Also that you're passing. Some programs look at class ranking. It's no surprise if North Americans hell bent on returning home don't really care as much about the internal exams at a particular medical school.
For the clinical years, you can't compare the North American rotations to the Australian ones I would say. Anecdotally, so take what I say with a grain of salt, having done rotations in both continents and caught up with friends who are residents there now with their own students etc.
It's treated as work in the North American hospitals, so the whole philosophy is different. It's possibly related to the fact that there's no internship year over there, you go straight into a full year of med or surg. Not like the internship year here, where it's a mix of surg, med, emerg etc. The sort of general internship was eliminated from Canada in the 90s. They also believe you should learn on the job, the patient is the textbook. You might get a week off to study for rotation exams in Australia, you're lucky to even get a morning off over there. It's much more practical. In Australia, I think some clinicians would like to see a move to a more practical, but as of yet, it's more didactic or about observation. You observe a ward round, may be get to write a coupla notes for the team and then you go home and watch lectures and read about it. Or see patients and practice doing cases on your own and find some nice registrar to present to. If lucky, I'd get to do admissions. Or I'd get to run clinics, but this wasn't always the case.
One Australian consultant joked to me that the real learning begins in intern year. In North America, they aren't joking when they call final year the sub-intern year. Students get 30 hours shifts and pagers. Not saying if one system is better than the other by the way, just that they're a helluva lot different. The plus side to being in Australia at least is better lifestyle and arguably, more spare time to do well on the Steps or the 'EE.
