(I'm summarizing it all for you now because I had no idea what it was until I started med school. If you want to learn more about it, you should look it up.)
Some people think it's a waste of time. Almost everyone hates preparing for it and attending the sessions because it just interrupts everything else. Either way, as long as you show and spend a reasonable amount of time looking up some sources, it's free points applied towards all of your grades. At Ross, the grade you get in PBL scaled to 5% and is applied to all of your subjects. (For example, all of your actual Biochemistry grades account for 95% of the Biochemistry grade for that semester. The remaining 5% is from your PBL grade.
Anyway;
I bring this up now because my group just finished the last PBL session for the semester and we got 99.5%.
According to the grade calculator (Excel Spreadsheet) provided by the school, my grades are looking something like this:
- 50% of the Anatomy grades have been accounted for and I need at least 55.45% on the 2nd Anatomy Practical, Mini 3, and the Final.
- 50% of the Biochemistry grades have been accounted for and I need at least 54.72% on Mini 3 and the Final.
- 58% of the Histology grades have been accounted for and I need at least 38.07% on the 2nd Histology Practical, Mini 3, and the Final.
- 38% of the Physiology grades have been accounted for and I need at least 48.31% on Mini 3 and the Final.
- 45% of the DPS grades have been accounted for and I need at least 53.83% on the DPS Practical, Mini 3, and the Final.
(And this is entirely possible.)
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5 comments:
Pbl can be used in quite a lot of different ways. My course is centred entirely around PBL and other dissection classes etc. complement it, but we don't get graded on the actual PBL, we still have traditional exams.
I suppose how much you like it depends on your best learning style, but I find it infinitely preferable to lectures where I often learn nothing of value.
Pretty sure PBL originated in Australia and it's been around for a couple of decades! Personally I think it is a ridiculous idea for pre-clinical students.
Hi bobjob14,
Haha... well, um... I'll just point out and emphasize the "?"s that I included in my original post and nod & smile.
-Jonathan
Attended MacMaster University in Hamilton Ontario Canada for occupational therapy over twenty years ago where they claimed that PBL was the newest and best way to study medicine and that they were the first school to do so. Still remember what a pain in the bum those classes were. We were graded not only on the papers we had to produce for each problem but also on each "performance" during every PBL discussion. Imagine 8-10 cut-throat students all trying to display that they were the smartest, best communicators and "team" players all at once. At the end of each group everyone had to self evaluate their performance and then listen to the "constructive' criticism of the group...petty manipulations designed to make you look bad in front of instructors, students hiding the best research journals in the med school library so that no one else could access them for the PBL discussion....ahhh, the fond memories of PBL! But having said that I think the skills I learned in PBL have been the most helpful in my various careers. (The only thing worse were anatomy bell -ringer exams where students purposely moved the flags on the anatomical dissections...but that's another discussion!) Good luck on your studies!
Hi Carrie,
On the last day we also had to self-evaluate ourselves, evaluate the group, then evaluate each other in front of everyone else.
The biggest difference I can see is that the grades we receive for PBL are group grades, so there's no incentive to tear each other down or try to 1-up someone else. (I'm assuming you were graded individually by the way you described it.)
The instructors can take some points off individually if you miss a session or if you are completely unprepared and you're just keeping the seat warm. But I don't think that happens that much.
-Jonathan
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