PBL in the Undergraduate MD Program at McMaster University: Three Iterations in Three Decades
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When the undergraduate MD program of McMaster University admitted its first cohort of 20 students in 1969, it heralded a major change in medical school pedagogy that has influenced the education of medical students around the world. The three-year PBL curriculum, which emphasized small-group tutorials, self-directed learning, a minimal number of didactic presentations, and student evaluation that was based almost entirely on performance in the tutorial, represented a radical departure from traditional curricula. Since the inception of the original curriculum in 1969, there have been two major curriculum revisions, the most recent of which was in 2005. The original curriculum attempted to integrate both basic science and clinical science into the biomedical problems. The second iteration of the curriculum focused on priority health problems and centered on a list of common medical problems as the foundation for curriculum organization, on the basis that an understanding of the management of common conditions included areas of knowledge that would be essential for clinical competence. Under the third, current curriculum, the COMPASS (concept-oriented, multidisciplinary, problem-based, practice for transfer, simulations in clerkship, streaming) model was adopted. Under this concept-based system, emphasis is placed on underscoring the underlying concepts in the curriculum with a logical sequencing of both the concepts and the body systems. This article briefly reviews the history of the development of the undergraduate MD program at McMaster and the three curricula that have been developed during the past three decades.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".