I absolutely disagree with your assessment of the school.
This is good. More information for prospective students. I mostly bolded things that I either recently learned or didn't know due to not being far along enough to experience it.
The school does a horrible job at preparing us for the boards. Sometimes they don't cover material necessary for the boards at all, cover it too little or go overboard on things that don't matter. Then there are tons of hours wasted on these terrible small groups. The cumulative tests at the end are worthless as all that happens is that people wing them.
I've seen what DO 2019 has tried to do with an Anki "group" and my class has a more "robust" group with more competent card writers. We even modified bro's deck to match the "study guide" they gave us and after having done that deck for the week prior to the cum. exam, I
feel like I smashed that exam (but they don't post the results for whatever reason so I have only feels instead of data). For the "practice" exam, using the same kind of long-term SRS prep, the Anki peeps were scoring 65-75% when the average was 48%. We have surveys that agree with the winging thing though. It's my understanding that NBME questions are written very well or close enough to USMLE-style so it sucks that people don't try to use the experience to their benefit.
Kaplan Q-Bank is absolute garbage. The school should be providing USMLE-Rx or UWorld if they care about boards at all.
Agreed. UWorld would be awesome, but I've heard that should be "saved" until near test time, so maybe USMLE-Rx replacing Kaplan would be better. I believe one of the faculty has a conflict of interest via Kaplan though... so dunno if that can happen.
OMM is done overboard at the school and is not reflective of how the boards test you on it, so it's another giant waste of time. We are the only school that has a "cranial week" and have forced OMM rotations. Many schools are doing only 1.5 hours of OMM weekly while we do 4.
The time difference seems to be in the OMM lecturing (I might be doing Anki cards on my laptop instead of listening though). I really wish lab was just showing up and practicing. We could watch lectures on our own. As for cranial WEEK(?). I haven't tasted that grog, but I hope it isn't an actual 5 days. As for non-boards prep, that's good to know in advance.
We do not get 8 weeks off to prepare for the boards. We barely get about 5.5-6 weeks assuming you don't fail any patient encounters you have to repeat (50%+ of the class fails at least one). Almost everyone I knew that didn't think WesternU had poor curriculum certainly came around once they realized the ****storm incoming from boards. After all, at least 60 students had to delay taking the boards because they were so poorly unprepared by our faculty, and out of our entire class only 70% took USMLE. Those that did well was because they started studying for boards during cardio and sacrificed honoring classes. For step 2, at least 10% of the class failed the boards.
Again, at least in our Anki group, most of us are going through the parts of bros deck that have been covered so far (which currently means General Principles:: MCBM and IDIT stuff with the random anatomy minutiae thrown in). Between adding minutiae seen in lectures and "good" texts, explanatory GIFs, and comparing to FA 2017, it doesn't seem too bad. I'm sure that most students are not independent learners though - AND the things you mention certainly don't help them to become independent, but I can see enough anti-"tryhard" culture here and there, struggling people, and super-star crammers to know that if your class is anything like mine, some of the shet-stormery is self-inflicted.
I could go on, but I'll leave it at that. Your first semester indoctrination will fade.
Eh... I just really abhor feeling helplessness. Shouldn't people indoctrinate themselves to have the discipline to start board prep really, really early if they're entering a poorly prepping med school? Learning Medicine: An Evidence-Based Guide (-Peter Wei) was a good book to read before this all started so while I'm not getting 95s in classes and cracking necks like Steven Seagal, I go over flashcards in small group and generally don't see the WesternU "obstacles" as being large enough to get emotional over.
This is because you have never been to a real small group session. Wait until you three 4-hour small group sessions in a week.
Eh... The Cystic Fibrosis and the DMII small groups were done in 1/3rd of the allotted time and considering the time block and relatively low info density/repetition in the optional large group lecture, this
seems exaggerated. Maybe for students who aren't setting their own agenda and using the idle time wisely, this would be bad, but these sessions seem to be arbitrary, pace slowers - at most.
Wait until IPE gets scheduled during the week before an IDIT or Neuro test then tell me how these 2 hours is okay to waste.
Checked the Sharepoint. Doesn't happen for IDIT or Neuro and a 1.5 hour session happens before the Blood and Lymph final. Could be luck or them learning from how they tortured your class.
Your response has a lot of good perspective and info though. I think that most students would agree with you. But oddballs like me have no idea what you're talking about sometimes. And having legit "institutions screwing around with your time" life experience desensitizes me to the small-scale stuff I see at this school. I encourage people to look up post histories of people who say "weird" things so they can see if what they read applies to them personally.
This one hurts especially after improving my app so much. After getting rejected last year I sought advice from admissions and was told that being on hold isn't very promising as so many applicants get placed in this category. So bummed.
