"Nuts & Bolts 2" - A Guide to the Clinical Years Section 1: General Information Table of Contents Evaluations Residents and faculty attending physicians evaluate your performance and complete your evaluations. Residents work closely with you and often have the best idea of your overall performance. Attendings evaluate your presentations; therefore, it is important to practice, practice, practice. Attendings usually talk with the residents in order to supplement their assessment of you. Clerkship or site directors then use the comments of attendings and house staff to write your summary evaluation. Your individual evaluations by residents and faculty as well as your summary evaluation will be accessible to you on E*Value (our Web-based application for survey, evaluation, data collection, analysis, and reporting of clerkship performance), once they have been submitted and after you have completed your instructor and course evaluations. A printed copy of your final evaluation will be placed in your student file in the Office of Curricular Affairs (OCA) in room S-221. It often takes several months before the final evaluation is filed. If you believe an evaluation is unfair, you should speak directly to the clerkship or site director immediately. You have eight weeks following the posting of your completed evaluation to E*Value or submission of your evaluation to the Office of Curricular Affairs to get a clerkship grade or comments revised. The Honors grade is awarded to students on the basis of their outstanding performance on all aspects of the clerkship: clinical knowledge, clinical skills, and professional and personal attributes. To earn Honors, students need to be judged outstanding by all of their supervising faculty and residents. Honors are limited to 25-30% of students who take each core clerkship. OCA maintains an "open file" policy, which means that you may look at your file any time during office hours: weekdays 8:00 A.M. until 5:00 P.M. Your file contains third- and fourth-year clinical clerkship evaluations; AMCAS application; copies of petitions; research proposals; etc. You may check out any of these documents and make copies of them. Student files are confidential. Thus, if you ask a faculty member to write a letter of recommendation, you will need to photocopy information from your file yourself and give it to the letter writer, along with a current CV. Broad Categories of Evaluation: Clinical Knowledge: Includes fund of knowledge, judgment/reasoning; independent study, and the ability/motivation to read and learn on your own. Clinical Skills: Includes the ability to obtain a history, perform a physical exam, present a case, produce a differential diagnosis, act with responsibility, and demonstrate interest in your patients. Professional & Personal Attributes: Includes responsibility, dependability, and personal attributes such as the ability to get along with patients, their families, faculty, house staff, and other health care workers.