I am sorry you are frustrated by your curriculum and while the complaints you listed don't seem to be very common at all, I think all schools have students complain about lack of correlations to step 1 and nitpicky details. At my school, we learn a lot of the "latest" stuff that's not on step one yet and a lot of clinical pearls that may not be tested on step 1.
For the 25% failing an exam, we regularly have something similar occur for a notoriously difficult exam every year and then we had it happen again for a recently introduced exam covering a lot of information clinical medicine that we had to go do an official computer exam for (previously it was a take home with a due date). Besides that, we have not come close to those kinds of numbers refularly. When this situation did occur for the notoriously difficult exam the guaranteed pass at our school is 75% and the average was like a 71% so a majority of our class failed to hit a guaranteed pass and a significant number failed to hit the "buffer pass" which was a 70%
What they did was an analysis on the questions, found the ones the highest scorers had the highest variability on (some gunners answered A others B, others C) and used other methods to throw certain questions out. After this, everyone's scores increased and the average was a 79 which equated to a normally difficult exam. Everyone I know is still in med school with me but we have a big class. I am on curriculum committee at my school and at one meeting it was reported that approximately 6-10 students failed anatomy out of 300. From there on, I would assume that the failure rate would be much lower.
As for 91.7% pass rate for first year that you are reporting...I don't know...doesn't seem disastrous but still seems kind of low. In our class, we have a lower. rate and one factor is using a program called student "modification".
In this system, administration seeks out students who are at a high risk of failing their anatomy or histology (first series of classes) midway through the courses. (Example is if they scored 50% on their 1st of 4 equally weighted exams). They ask them them why they are failing and if they'd be interested in avoiding a failure on their transcript. If it's because of the burden and students say they'd do a lot better if they could focus on one course, they then are given the option to modify by taking two years to complete the first year curriculum and then take one course at a time. I initially thought that it seemed like a short term fix because what happens to the students when they get to second year material and have to do even more work? However, according to the data at our school, a majority of students who modify evolve and avoid future academic failures. Some even get better at it and many of those who modified did so for family or personal reasons, not academic ones so they were actually good student s in the firsT place.
So, as a long answer to your question, neither of those are normal and I suggest you first speak with your curriculum committee reps and then student senate. Curriculum committee reps will then bring up the issues with whoever is the associate dean of your basic sciences curriculum. He or she will then address it at the next curriculum committee meeting and hopefully they'll start realizing the need to change things. Honestly though, the course director is normally required to report course performance statistics (% honor, fail, etc.). However, it's still important to get student support because any wise medical school knows that an unhappy student body can be catastrophic to admissions.
What may help is holding a public forum on this issue or finding some way to gather secure (so no one can vote 10000x) quantative feedback before you make these moves.
Lastly, I am pretty sure the LCME takes student satisfaction very seriously and this sort of thing will not sit well with them at your next inspection so it is in the best interest of your school to do what is necessary sooner than later.
Hope this gets resolved!!
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Normal to fail 25% to half of class on exams during second year?
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