To Whom It May Concern:
As a fourth term student currently being affected by the Pathology Department issues, I feel I have the right, and in fact the duty, to speak out.
Throughout the length of my education I have always been in the gifted program, the honors program, and always toward the top of my class. I have always made A’s and B’s here at SGU until this semester. I failed the second pathology exam after getting an A on the first exam. The reason I failed the second exam was not because I did not study, but because the department failed to prepare me. I was wholly unprepared. I was unprepared because the Pathology Department refuses to teach me. Lecturers read off their slides and never teach us how to make the huge mental leaps that we are asked to make on test day. We are never taught connections, which is something the department emphasizes. We are expected to make multistep connections ourselves that neither Robbins, our textbook, nor the tutors in lab point out for us.
I am not asking for easier exams; on the contrary, I appreciate hard exams if they are fair and their purpose in being difficult is to test my knowledge. I do not appreciate exams in which a stem is an entire page long, and I only have 75 seconds to answer; those of us who are fast readers can at least manage to finish the stem in that time, but still do not have enough time to get to the fourth order question. I do not appreciate exams that ask connections to be made which have never been presented in lecture or lab. I do not appreciate exams for which the goal seems to be to destroy the spirit of an entire medical school cohort.
I always thought medical school was supposed to prepare us to be confident, knowledgeable, and able physicians. Now I feel that at SGU, the goal of the Pathology Department is to break our spirit, destroy our confidence, and make us fear for our futures. I do not want easier exams, but I do want to be TAUGHT. I am paying a ridiculous amount of money to this school, and I demand an education. I want to be taught and prepared for life as a physician. I am not paying this school so that the Pathology Department can go unchecked and pursue any form of “education” that they wish, including the militaristic attitude of breaking a person’s spirit, which seems to be their preferred teaching style. Unfortunately, adding two clicker questions to each lecture will not solve this problem. Removing slides, which used to be available for previous terms, and refusing to let us review the pathology images on SonicFoundry will also not solve this problem. This will only be solved when the Pathology Department decides to teach us the connections between diseases, how to approach questions clinically, and how to master the material. If they want me to pass their exam, which is presumably what they want from their students, then they must teach me how to pass their exams.
I used to think that the professors in graduate and professional school wanted their students to succeed. My experience at SGU has taught me differently, and I no longer so naively think that the professors of the Pathology Department are on my side. I am the student, and without students there would be no school. I demand the education for which I am paying, and that I was promised.
Thanks very much, now get on it!
