Medical school grades, in particular during the 3rd year clinical rotations, are an important part of the residency application to any residency including Stanford Anesthesia. This is in large part because what the student does on a clinical rotation is the closest thing we have to what they will do as an anesthesia resident.
However, one of the challenges for all Residency Selection Committees is that each medical school has their own grading system. These schemes could have a letter “C” stand for average for a school that use an A/B/C letter grade system, or “commendable”, or even “completed”. Thankfully, grading keys that explain the grading system are often provided with the transcripts in ERAS. Residency programs spend a fair amount of time deciphering these grading structures when reviewing files. It is most helpful when the school provides a Table or Diagram indicating what percentage of the students get a particular grade on a particular rotation.
A recent study by Shimahara from the ENT department here at Stanford published in June 2010 in the J of Graduate Medical Education found that:
- 64% of medical schools used either an H/P/F grading system
- 17% of medical schools used a variant of the A/B/C system in which A or Aplus is the highest grade
- 5% of schools including UCLA for example use a P/F system.
- 3% of medical schools used a grade point average with a high being 4.0.
- 11% of schools used either a combination of the aforementioned systems or grade systems that were “undecipherable”!