Dear MCB, Stop wasting our time!!!

Today, yet again, the MCB department has decided to combine us with the first semester class, making one very large overcrowded class in LH1. Just for a little quick background, because I'm not sure if I've already written about this, but MCB is basically a mash up of 3 classes that don't go really go together that well: cell bio, biochem, and genetics. Maybe there is some way to put them all together, but AUC has been totally unable to figure out how. For our (2nd) semester class, they decided to not integrate them at all, but just break each class up, throw them in a random order, and have them taught by a bunch of different teachers. For the first semesters, they decided to make it somewhat more sensible, and teach each area separately, basically making it 3 separate classes, as it was before.

After making all of these changes, there was obviously some overlap between the two classes. So, instead of teaching them separately, they decided to teach the two classes together. Unfortunately, they were again unable to properly organize this, and they wind up teaching us the same thing twice. I'm really getting sick of hearing, "2nd semesters have already had this, but we're gonna review it for the first semesters!"

For the past week or so, it seems an awful lot like they have run out of things to teach us. So, while they absolutely flew threw the biochem part of the course, sometimes cramming huge amounts of information into the last 2 days before an exam because they had to rush through it, they are now very slowly making there way through the easier stuff. They are also having multiple teachers teach almost the exact same thing, in 3 or 4 different ways. And now, they've decided to make it worse and teach us the same thing again, but crowd us with the first semester class! Today, we're going over muscular dystrophies...something we've already done in at least two other lectures. Do they really have 3 days worth of information on muscular dystrophy to teach us?

This is where we have issues with PhD teachers instead of MD teachers. I don't think the PhD teachers always know what is important for us to learn and what is useless PhD level information. One example of this is the fact that in nearly every packet that we get in genetics, Nail patella syndrome (a mutation in LMX1B) is mentioned. The genetics teacher did research on this at Hopkins, which is good for him, but the incidence is 1:50,000 (compared to about 1:600 for something like Down Syndrome). So basically, we'll most likely never see or hear of this disease again, it's not mentioned in USMLE review books, and likely nobody in a US school has ever heard of it. However, it just keeps coming up, over and over, for us.

Some classes here do a very good job of presenting roughly the same information that is in the review books, meaning it will likely show up on the USMLE and is something important for us to know. Other classes, however, do a very bad job of this. Oh..they've also decided to give us two cumulative finals, one is the shelf exam, made up of actual old USMLE questions, and the other is their own cumulative final. Apparently, they don't think that the shelf tests all of their information well enough. Seems to me that if it's not important enough for the USMLE to test on, we probably don't need to waste our time learning the little details of it. What a great way to spend my time studying. MCB really cannot end soon enough! I don't think anyone in my class is going to miss it.