Hello Med Hatters!
This segment will be quite short compared to my other posts. Since starting medical school several weeks ago, both my classmates and I have noticed that as time has gone on, the amount of competencies and tests in a week have increased. If you are looking for a more realistic view of the testing schedule that occurs in medical school, then I hope this can clear some things up!
Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, or KCU, is known to have one of the hardest curriculums in the D.O. sphere. Rocky Vista is another school with a very difficult curriculum. So even though going through this particular schedule is difficult due to the intensity, the board scores for our school are pretty damn high. Consistently. In fact, our school brags about it quite a bit!
So if you are just roaming the internet looking for information on scheduling for medical school, you are particularly interested in KCU’s scheduling and testing, or you are just curious in general, then you’ve come to the right place.
Some Background:
For those of you who haven’t been poking around my site, let me clarify what some of the things on the schedule mean.
PCM– this is our Principles of Clinical Medicine course or our “how to be a doctor” course. This includes learning how to take histories and write notes, to learning how to do exams, and trying to critically think and figure out what our patients have. Eventually we will learn to incorporate treatment plans, but for now we are still learning how to do basic interview and assessment skills. This course not only has exams in it, but things called SP encounters.
SP encounters are where we have an actor who has a script they stick to and play the part of a sick patient. The scenarios are relevant to what we have learned so far in medical school. Even though they aren’t completely random like it is in the real world, as first years we’ve only learned so much, so they pick from one of the many possible scenarios we’ve learned so far and see if we can figure it out. We need to hone in on our interview skills, professionalism, directing the flow of the visit, and learning to exam. All of these things come with plenty of awkwardness and terrible time management, so that is why we practice! As a first year, we aren’t really graded except to make sure we show up. They know we are all terrible at this, so they don’t have much to actually grade us on yet.
{Update on this: We did have one graded SP encounter in our first semester. This basically was graded by our SP, or our fake patient/actor. We were graded on if we could get 70% of the history and could get up to 70% of the exam for the complaint given. We were also graded on how we communicated. In order to pass we had to get 70% on both parts. There is clearly some variation in grading as each person was graded by a separate SP during the groups. If the SP deems we didn’t pass, our instructors will watch and grade the video to make sure it was fairly graded.}
Another component besides exams and SP encounters include competencies. This can be done for a range of things, but is mainly used to test a certain set of skills. Skills that we’ve been tested on so far in competencies include taking vital signs, doing injections, and performing certain exams.
OS– OS stands for osteopathic skills course. This is where we learn and get tested on osteopathic manipulation/treatment that all D.O.’s are required to learn. Not every D.O. chooses to use this skill in their real life practice, but many can incorporate even just small amounts of it into their practice. Some physicians choose to only do OMM or osteopathic manipulation as their practice.
In OS, we have lectures and labs. The lectures are like your typical lectures that you have in other medical school courses or even college in general. The labs are where we learn and practice the techniques, and we are required to keep and fill out a log outside of lab time to make sure we are practicing on a range of people.
In OS, we have quizzes, exams, and things called CPA’s. I wish I could tell you what a CPA stood for, but basically it is an exam where we have to explain and do a technique on another classmate. So we learn a bunch of techniques to get tested on one or two of them during the CPA, and we generally have no idea which one(s) they are going to choose for us to do. It is different for each partner and each testing group.
Block Courses-These are your typical “classes” in medical school. Such as your biochemistry course, your musculoskeletal course, etc. These courses usually only consist of quizzes and exams, but if there is a lab component to it (meaning the anatomy lab), then we also get a practical which tests our laboratory knowledge as well.
Med Info- This is our medical informatics class. It is a pass/fail class and we don’t have regular or rigid classes with this. But we do get a lecture every once in a while that results in us having to take a quiz. The quizzes aren’t very hard, but they do take time out of your day and other studies in order to do them.
Bioethics– I did not include my bioethics course as the quizzes don’t tend to show up on my schedule, and I would have to hunt on blackboard to find them (I’m too lazy at the moment to do that). Similar concept occurs where as with our med info course. We have a lecture course (or sometimes a small group discussion) every once in a while, and then we get quizzed on the information. The bioethics quizzes can be taken more than once thankfully, so if we are really stumped on something we can re-take it.
Click the link below to be taken to the general schedule.
Medical School Schedule-First 3 Months
{Update: I have added up through my first semester to give you a full idea of how our semester went!}
Let me know what you think in the comments below or what you would like to see in the future!