FYI for anyone interested in University of Louisville School of Medicine, you may want to reconsider applying here.
M2s received the following email today:
Dear M2 Students,
Recently, the Educational Program Committee (EPC) reviewed student academic outcomes since changing to a pass-fail grading schema for M1-2 in Fall 2019. A review of the data demonstrated that student academic achievement and success in medical school has decreased significantly following the change to a pass-fail curriculum, including serious adverse events like course failure, Step 1 delay, leaves of absence related to academic difficulty, Step 1 failure, and continued academic difficulty into the M3 year.
After significant discussion, the EPC voted to replace the pass-fail grading schema in M1-2 with a grading schema that matches the clerkships: honors, high pass, pass, and fail. The change was specifically discussed for your class and thought to add significant benefit in terms of student overall success as well as ability to distinguish academic performance, so the EPC voted for this change to apply to your class as well as the incoming M1 class. It was also decided that further data analysis was needed to evaluate the grade criteria and cutoffs for each of these new transcript grades in M1-2 courses, and that discussion was scheduled for today’s EPC meeting so that data could be analyzed and developed into a report to support that decision-making. Formal announcement of these changes to your class were held pending those decisions, as they would make the discussion clearer to students.
That discussion occurred today, and the EPC passed:
-No change in pass-fail cutoffs. Students with an overall course score of 70% or above AND a high-stakes average score of 70% or above, will get a grade of Pass as has previously been in place. Using historical data from the last five years, this would mean about 50% of students would get this grade.
-Students with a course average of 85%-91.9999% would be awarded a transcript grade of High Pass. Using historical data from the last five years, this would mean about 35% or more of students in a typical year would get this grade.
-Students with a course average of 92% and above would be awarded a transcript grade of Honors. Using historical data from the last five years, this would mean about 15% or more of students in a typical year would get this grade.
The reasons for making this change are sound and are supported by the collective hundreds of teaching-years experience of your teaching faculty and administrators involved in discussion of this decision, as well as a lot of outcomes data that demonstrate the need for this change, increasing the urgency and need to apply this change to your class.
There is a clear, observable, quantifiable decrease in the health of our learning culture, student academic success overall, and the level of learning that students demonstrate in our curriculum since going to pass-fail, and it has long-term consequences for the individual student as well as for the class. Changing to a more stratified grading system also provides clear, unequivocal benefit to the at least 50% of the student body who will qualify for higher transcript grades that help them show they are competitive for residency, as well as boosting the health of the learning environment and expectations for learning, which benefits all students. We also have significant evidence that students who come into medical school with greater academic need are especially affected negatively by the pass-fail grading system, and have suffered the most in terms of academic and personal distress, and that continuing in a pass-fail curriculum is a disservice to them as well. Like all of the decisions made by the EPC’s governance of the school, this change was made to only to benefit students and serve them better, not to adversely affect them.
However, when this EPC decision was discussed with your class leaders, they conveyed some fear, concerns, and questions from the class with a need for more information about the rationale for this change, and indicated the class desired more feedback to be given to the EPC by students regarding this decision. We understand there is a lot that students may want to ask bout this and seek to understand about this decision, and that they may wish to give feedback on a decision they feel affects them strongly. We believe it is important to honor this as part of due process and are also on a tight timeline to get this to all happen and have everything in place for you at the start of your school year, and need to act quickly for this to work. This request to directly present this change for the M2 class to students and gather feedback for EPC was conveyed today by your EPC representative [redacted] to the EPC, and was approved. We will hold a virtual town hall for your class tomorrow at 12 pm EST (link here), and will have a feedback form link that is posted in that session for you to give feedback on this, if desired.
TL;DR: ULSOM has changed the preclinical grading scale from Pass/Fail to Honors/High Pass/Pass/Fail without input from students effective immediately for both M1 and M2 classes
