TSR Med Students' Society Part III

Bugger. Back to square one... Actually I'm not complaining, the data collection was like the best week of my life cos I got to scrub in on ortho stuff from dawn til dusk for six days So it's a bonus for the logbook if nothing else.

I very nearly negged you for this..

Someone revise finals for me. I can't be bothered.

I very nearly negged you for this..

Someone revise finals for me. I can't be bothered.

From what I understand, posters you have to be first name authors, audits and research you just have to be an author. Is this right?

So you don't get the tutor notes either? It's irritating. Almost as if they're scared of us actually knowing something! Shock horror.

I very nearly negged you for this..

Someone revise finals for me. I can't be bothered.

It was a long time ago and I haven't been near an operating theatre in over six months

LOL

Saffie! Long time. How you doing? Revision blows.

The fact i can now count the time to finals in weeks instead of months is something that should scare me if i wasnt in complete denial.

Should hope so!! Crazy girl..


Bored of final year.. bored of ward rounds, clinics, patients, revision... so yeah! You?

Ditto! So many ward rounds last week, so many patients...Well it was ditto up until today...anaesthetics week, tubed my first patient!

I liked anaesthetics, it's good when patients are asleep and don't talk

Rather glad it's a matter of weeks left cause I cba with being a med student much longer. Just give me a proper job and pay me already!

The group on facebook - 'You know you're a medical student when you...' - just posted it.


I used to think it was a good way to learn and promoted a higher level of self-directed learning, which is important. Now I think it's so inconsistently done that the positives achieved by a good example of PBL are infrequent at best.

Mate, I kinda see what you mean. PBL in its purest form should work. I just think we have really badly written and uninteresting cases, coupled with an overload of information in too short a time frame, which just renders the entire process almost pointless.

Poorly written scenarios is the number one problem IMO - I had to facilitate a year 1 PBL session last week as part of this BSc and, yes its actually a very difficult job correctly facilitating a group, but half way through the session, the students literally went "Oh its IBS...lets just set objectives" (or words to that effect). There is no problem solving in such a case. There is no motivation to want to actually read up on the relevant issues. It just makes it seem like you're on a DIY course. It honestly takes the joy out of it - you literally go in and set bog standard objectives (pathophysiology, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, management and maybe the psychosocial aspects if you're feeling keen).

In second year, most of the PBLs have an accompanying lecture to help with the understanding etc, but I honestly think they really need to sit down and set much more stimulating problem scenarios if they really want to promote self directed learning and better problem solving skills etc that PBL in its purity claims to promote. I mean, PBL scenarios don't always have to be in the written form - there could be videos, audio tapes, pictures, etc. I just reckon its laziness on the most part.

If there's one thing I've learnt from this BSc, it is that PBL theoretically should work. That said, the half hearted attempts at making it work in most places mean, sadly, they don't. I still think I get more out of them than lectures, but they could be so much more effective if people just took the time to create proper scenarios and not bombard us with more than one PBL a week. I'm not too worried about giving students the tutor notes and stuff - all the med school needs to do is stop setting exam questions that literally match the PBL tutor notes word for word and students will actually go about pbl the correct way and won't care about not seeing these rather condensed set of notes.

Poorly written scenarios is the number one problem IMO - I had to facilitate a year 1 PBL session last week as part of this BSc and, yes its actually a very difficult job correctly facilitating a group, but half way through the session, the students literally went "Oh its IBS...lets just set objectives" (or words to that effect). There is no problem solving in such a case. There is no motivation to want to actually read up on the relevant issues. It just makes it seem like you're on a DIY course. It honestly takes the joy out of it - you literally go in and set bog standard objectives (pathophysiology, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, management and maybe the psychosocial aspects if you're feeling keen).

I think the argument against releasing the notes here tends to be: the students won't engage with the sessions properly if they know that they'll just be given what they need to know at the end. But I think that says a lot more about the sessions than the students. This year there will be people going into the exam not just not knowing material, but never realising it was expected of them simply because of shoddy CBL sessions where tutors don't ensure that their students are aware of what should've been covered.



That's so true. Happened so often last year. "Oh, it's obviously diabetes..." cue people feeling bored and as though their time is wasted for the next hour.


With the technology at our disposal in 2012, I'd say there should be other media brought in.


I partly think the problem is time. In PBL everything is so much slower. It takes more time to cover material. A PBL course needs to have another couple of years tagged on!

Well that's what happens when students teach students, facililtator or not. If you pack them into a lecture theatre, sure, some will fall asleep, but theres no variation between PBL groups - as long as you use good lecturers, everyone gets the same.

It's not the students teaching students that slows things down (that doesn't even happen really, or shouldn't). It's the searching for information, selecting the right books, synthesising the information yourself, etc. If you're given the information -- whether in a powerpoint lecture slide, tutor notes, seminar handout, whatever -- it essentially removes the arduous, time consuming element that is rife in PBL and allows much more information to be covered in a smaller space of time.

And as for using good lecturers, that's just as variable as using good PBL facilitators, it just means that the entire year suffers rather than a section of said year.

PBL.

I loathed how it was done.
That is why I almost failed the module of PBL

It works when you have a great facilitator (we had in yr 2 and it made PBL bearable for me) but other than that bloody useless I find. Tutorials are better.

It's not the students teaching students that slows things down (that doesn't even happen really, or shouldn't). It's the searching for information, selecting the right books, synthesising the information yourself, etc. If you're given the information -- whether in a powerpoint lecture slide, tutor notes, seminar handout, whatever -- it essentially removes the arduous, time consuming element that is rife in PBL and allows much more information to be covered in a smaller space of time.

And as for using good lecturers, that's just as variable as using good PBL facilitators, it just means that the entire year suffers rather than a section of said year.

Do you not think it is better to have a good lecturer cover a decent chunk of material than to have every srudent wasting time? If I go through our lectures properly, it makes about an hour per lecture preclin - I dread to think how much time would be spent if I also had to research the lecture