When a student at the University of Texas's Health Science Center—San Antonio recently learned that his school had been placed on probation, he contacted Elizabeth Wiley, a student at George Washington University's School of Medicine and Health Sciences to understand what medical school probation means.
Wiley still remembers receiving an E-mail in October 2008 informing first- and second-year students at GW to report to a mandatory meeting the following day. "I think we all were kind of like, 'What's going on?' but didn't necessarily have a sense of how outside the realm of normal this was," says Wiley, then in her second month at GW.
At the meeting, the more than 300 students learned that the medical school accreditor, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), had placed the school on probation. Jointly funded by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Medical Association (AMA), the LCME reviews the 135 U.S. and 17 Canadian medical schools it accredits every eight years. It's empowered to put schools on probation—typically a two-year process, during which schools remain accredited—and to revoke accreditation.
"[T]here wasn't any audible gasp or anything that was overly dramatic," GW's Wiley says. "As more information was becoming available, there were certainly some emotions in the room." And, Wiley remembers, students posed some questions "that may have been a little charged" and made "a lot of attempts to blame different entities in the school."
[Read about George Washington University's medical school probation.]
Wiley says she wasn't familiar with the LCME at the time, and the questions her peers posed—ranging from what probation meant to how it would affect residency prospects—suggested they weren't either. Students became less concerned as they learned more about the reasons for the probation, which GW described as "curricular issues, lack of study space ... [and] administrative, clinical faculty challenges," Wiley says. "I did feel like I had some sense walking out of that meeting of what needed to happen."
Barbara Barzansky, the LCME secretary, was recently quoted in The Daily Texan, the student newspaper of University of Texas—Austin, saying probation doesn't usually affect students or the volume of applicants to a school on probation. She clarified over E-mail that she was speaking generally and anecdotally. "We have never done a study of the effects of probation," she says.
The LCME doesn't publicize the reasons schools are put on probation and doesn't release its reports on schools' violations—which lends a cloak of secrecy and ambiguity to the probation announcements that schools are required to issue. Though GW said at the time that the LCME concerns were "mostly superficial," they included high levels of student debt and inadequate monitoring of students' time with patients, according to a 2009 Washington Post article.
Wiley says she became convinced that GW would resolve its issues and would be taken off probation, which did happen in 2010. "I don't think that wringing your hands and freaking out about the prospect of what this is going to look like when you are on the residency trail is really a good use of anyone's time, resources, or energy," Wiley says.
[Learn how to transfer between U.S. medical schools.]
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