MD Shortened Clerkships, same grading criteria

[neurotictenner]

Hi guys,

So due to COVID-19, my school had to truncate all the remaining clerkships, so 6 week clerkships are down to 5, and 12 week clerkships are down to 10. However, the scary part is that the grading criteria and percentile cutoffs are unchanged. We tried to reach out to our administration, who refused to budge on the grading issue. The percentile and aggregate cutoffs are already hard as is, much less to do it with less time for each clerkship. This is bogus. Just wanted to rant.

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[efle]

Oof. Our school also truncated everything (8 week --> 6 week and 4 week --> 3 week). Plus many of the clerkships look very different right now, for example on medicine people are rounding via Zoom and barely going into patient rooms unless they're following that patient.

Our admin was originally planning to still keep all the same grading too, but we did a class poll and found it was 80% favoring Pass/Fail - 20% opposed. That flipped a few key deans to our side and they officially switched everything to Pass/Fail for the year a couple weeks later.

Maybe y'all can do something similar? Ours was just a 30 second google poll and it worked great. They might still ignore your plight, but at least put data in their face that makes sure they know just how unpopular their decision is first before they make it.

 

[neurotictenner]

Oof. Our school also truncated everything (8 week --> 6 week and 4 week --> 3 week). Plus many of the clerkships look very different right now, for example on medicine people are rounding via Zoom and barely going into patient rooms unless they're following that patient.

Our admin was originally planning to still keep all the same grading too, but we did a class poll and found it was 80% favoring Pass/Fail - 20% opposed. That flipped a few key deans to our side and they officially switched everything to Pass/Fail for the year a couple weeks later.

Maybe y'all can do something similar? Ours was just a 30 second google poll and it worked great. They might still ignore your plight, but at least put data in their face that makes sure they know just how unpopular their decision is first before they make it.

Sounds like a good idea. We'll give it a shot. The only issue is that my med school is not a particularly prestigious med school, so they'll prob be reluctant to do that. If they were to make it P/F, that'd put more weight on USMLE scores and pre-clinicals. We'll give it a shot in any case.

 

[efle]

Sounds like a good idea. We'll give it a shot. The only issue is that my med school is not a particularly prestigious med school, so they'll prob be reluctant to do that. If they were to make it P/F, that'd put more weight on USMLE scores and pre-clinicals. We'll give it a shot in any case.

The NBME shelves won't change, right? Still gotta pass that standardized benchmark. All they're really getting rid of is the BS subjective evaluations and no longer trying to compare between students during COVID.

 

[neurotictenner]

The NBME shelves won't change, right? Still gotta pass that standardized benchmark. All they're really getting rid of is the BS subjective evaluations and no longer trying to compare between students during COVID.

Not really, the subjective evals are still there. Also, the percentiles are based off of last year's cohort, who had 6- and 12- week clerkships, so inevitably, just due to having truncated clerkships, our performance will probably be slightly worse, and the percentiles will reflect this.

 

[Welshman]

We’re in a same boat, all of our rotations are now 5 weeks before we had 8 weeks of IM surgery and FM. Won’t budge on the percentiles for honors either but promised to “look at them at the end of the year”