Medical Student Finals Fail (urgent advice please)

Hi all,

This is a bit of a serious and saddening topic.

I am from the UK and we have OSCE and MCQ for our medical school. I have passed the MCQ with a decent mark but could not unfortunately reach the OSCE passing mark by 3marks.

Before I go further, I should explain our OSCE setup. We have 10 OSCEs with each of them having several components (hand washing, initial rapport, clinical content, communication skills as graded by the examiner, communication skills as graded by the patient, answering about ix and mx ... with each of these getting a scaling from bad, poor, average, above average, good).

As for my performance, majority of the stations I got in the mid 60s with 1 station with a 55% and 1 physical examination station in the 25% and the other physical examination with a 13% (I am very annoyed by this). I would like to add that for all the history taking stations, I did very poorly in the communication part because I was asking a lot of questions in a short period of time (which I felt was a necessity- I hope you all understand).

Anyways, I was given a week and made to do a supplementary which I did very poorly in- passing only 4 of the stations.I think I did very poorly in the supplementary because of the mental pressure of the initial failure and also because I was diagnosed with a lumbar radiculopathy which caused an intense amount of pain that led me to be bed bound for the duration of that 1week preparation. Not only that but I was given very poor feedback for original osce station I did (because of the grading style, you can imagine I was not able to be given appropriate feedback).

I was asked to meet the school soon and discuss what's next for me. I wanted to talk about all the aformentioned reasons why I couldn't perform in the supplementary and ask if they will consider taking my original OSCE into consideration. It was not even the clinical content- getting even a few marks in the communication skills will be enough to give me that passing markTo be honest, this has never happened to me ever and I'm in a position that I am very helpless with no one to talk to

I would advice any advice

Reply 1

Mee000

Just as a summary:
- I have done decently in my MCQ but couldn't meet the passing mark for OSCE (falling short by 3%). I was give a week and made to do a supplementary which I did very poorly in.
- I have been asked to meet with the Dean to discuss what I will be doing next. I feel I have reasons for why this was the case and, thus, why they should take my original OSCE into consideration and allow me to pass
- I wondered if anyone would have any suggestions as to how to word all of this

I would sincerely be grateful for any suggestions as I have no one to discuss this with