Overall Clerkship Grade Policy
Clerkship Clinical Floor Grade
Clerkship Exam
Students Presenting Psychiatric Aspects of Medicine (SPPAM)
Failure and Remediation
Grade Reporting
Medical Student Clerkship Evaluation Form Guidelines
Faculty Feedback to Students

Grading Policies

Overall Clerkship Grade Policy:

The contributions of each educational exercise towards the overall clerkship grade are as follows:

The final grade assignment is based on the total number of points earned out of the 360 maximum. 

The final grade for the psychiatry clerkship will be Honors, High Pass, Pass, Fail, Unsatisfactory or Incomplete per the SSOM grading system.

Clerkship Clinical Floor Grade

Approximately the fifth week of the clerkship, students will provide their supervising clinical attending(s) with the clinical evaluation form from their orientation packet.  The supervising clinical attending is asked to fill out the clinical evaluation form and then review the evaluation with the student.  At this time, if the student has any concerns regarding the clinical evaluation he/she was given, he/she may discuss this with the supervisor.  When the clinical evaluations have been reviewed, both the attending and student sign the form.  The attending is responsible for returning the form.

While the supervising clinical attending is ultimately responsible for the evaluation, they are encouraged to consider the resident's input.  In the event the student has worked with more than one attending, the attendings may do a composite evaluation or each attending may fill out a separate evaluation.  In the event of multiple attending evaluations, each evaluation will be weighted by the amount of clinical time the student spent with each attending.

Clerkship Exam

Students must pass the clerkship exam to pass the clerkship.  A passing grade is 70% or 84/120 questions correctly answered.  In the event a student scores less than 70%, the student will still pass if their score is within 2 standard deviations of their specific clerkship group's test mean.

Students Presenting Psychiatric Aspects of Medicine (SPPAM)

Faculty facilitators or senior resident facilitators will evaluate the individual student presentation.  The final numerical evaluation is the average of the SPPAM faculty evaluations.  Alternatively, the SPPAM faculty may fill out one composite evaluation for the student's presentation.

Competencies:                                                                                                                                     

Meeting Expectations, Meetings Expectations with Concerns, Not Meeting Expectations

Clinical Performance Evaluation

Clerkship Exam

Any exam performance that does not pass will result in a Not Meeting Expectations in the Knowledge Competency.  After successful remediation of the exam, this will be changed to "Meeting Expectations with Concerns" in the Knowledge Competency.

SPPAM

Clinical Skills-Standardized Patient

Any performance that is < 2 Standard Deviations below the mean and <70% will result in a Meeting Expectations with Concerns in the Communication Competency

Video OSCE

Overall

Any performance that is < 2 Standard Deviations below the Mean will result in a Meeting Expectations with Concerns in the competency's that best match up with the area(s) the student struggled.  The Mean and Standard Deviation will be a Rolling Mean from the prior 12 months of clerkship data.

 Failure and Remediation

Failure of floor performance will result in an overall clerkship failure.

A failing clinical performance evaluation will result in an overall clerkship failure and a need to remediate the clerkship.

If a student fails the clerkship exam he/she will receive a grade of U (unsatisfactory) for the clerkship.  The student will be given the opportunity to remediate the exam within 30 working days from the time the grades are submitted to the Registrar's Office.  Upon successful remediation, a revised grade of Pass will be submitted to the Registrar's Office.  If the remediation is unsuccessful, this will result in a failure of the Psychiatry Clerkship and a need to remediate the clerkship.

Students will not be required to remediate SPPAM, Standardized Patient, or Video OSCE due to a poor performance in that particular activity.  In the event of an irregularity in one of these exercises, that activity may need to be repeated/remediated per the discretion of the Clerkship Director.  In the event of an overall clerkship failure, these activities may play a role in the remediation of the clerkship.

Grade Reporting

The final grade will be reported to the Registrar within 30 days of the last day of the clerkship.  Once the Registrar has processed all documentation, they will notify you and you can find out your grade.  The SSOM grading system requires the grade data (grade ranges, grade cutoffs) to be in a percentage format.

End of the Year Review

At the end of the academic year, a review is done.  In this review an overall mean and standard deviation for the year is calculated.  In reviewing the entire year's worth of grades, some students would have received different grades using the full year's data than what they actually received from their individual clerkship.  For students who would benefit from the use of the full year's data, their grades are revised to the higher grade.  For students who would not benefit from the full year's data and actually get a lower grade, their grades remain what they received from their individual clerkship.

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