Hello All-
Wow. It's been a while since I posted to this thread! It's good to see all of you pre-M1's excited to be heading down sunny Florida. Hopefully you'll have an enjoyable and relaxing summer before starting the adventure of Med School in August.
A little business...I'm going to be contributing to the M1 orientation program. If you have any suggestions or requests, please pass them along. I can't guarentee we can accomodate everyone, but we can see what we can do. Most of it is driven by the administration, but there is some semblance of Student Government input. If you want to get an idea of what to expect, check out your class website. I gave Amra a copy of our orientation sked. Yours will be a lot shorter (hopefully) ours was 3 days of stuff crammed into a week.
I'm not intending to start a flame war here with Voyce or the lovely Kate <img border="0" alt="[Lovey]" title="" src="graemlins/lovey.gif" /> . However, I have a little different opinion about the infamous "Renal Exam"
First off: I think the "simple fix" is that the test should have been curved. It seems to me to be so straightforward. Slap the standard bell curve on the thing, and you have most of the problems solved. My undergrad degree was in engineering, where we lived and died by partial credit, and the curve. (and as an aside, here, just remember that since engineering exams have averages in the 40's sometimes, the people that designed the bridge you're driving over only knew 40% of the material!!! <img border="0" title="" alt="[Eek!]" src="eek.gif" /> )
Anyway, the "rub" with the Renal Exam is that they told us from the beginning "We don't curve" (And I seem to remember the guy that told us this doing so in his best Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: "Charlie don't surf" imitation). Yes, it's a little bit of an ego battle here, but right or wrong, that's the policy, and they're sticking to it.
(In my opinion), the test itself was hard. Renal Physiology is hard! However, I don't know if it was really "unfair." I think that it was in an entirely different format than we expected, written by a Professor that we didn't expect to have. I don't remember any questions that were completely off-the-wall, but they definately required a lot of concept juggling to try to figure them out. The "new" teacher and notes packet errors definately contributed to the confusion, but I don't think these things were the only two reasons that we had problems...remember, "Renal Physiology is Hard!" plus, we had just come off spring break, and a good percentage of us did *not* spend our break with renal books in hand. The bottom line here, is that I think there were many factors that contributed to us getting slammed by this test.
BTW, one of our professors told me why there is a "no questions during the test" policy. Apparently, last year, questions were allowed. Students complained, though, that the question-askers were getting an unfair advantage, so they went to the current policy.
Please don't think that the Nova administration is a band of evil overlords, seeking to crush the DO student population with their mighty fists. I think that a conspiricy to attrite our class by sending in a "ringer" is a bit of a reach. Despite the situation, there is still dialog between the students and the administration/faculty across the board about a lot of issues. Don't let this particular incident sour your opinion of Nova and its program.
I'm sure you'll get the word when the rest of this saga plays out. Recognize that there are lots of unknowns about this thing, so don't be hasty in passing judgement.
Meanwhile, stay excited about starting your M1 year...see ya this summer!!!
Cheers,
-Stickboy