The BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine MD program

PISCEs combines foundational science, pathophysiology and disease management, with threads such as anatomy, pharmacology, pathology, microbiology, infectious disease and oncology running through every module. Drawing on learning research, topics are spaced out and interleaved, returning in later modules and integrated cases to help long-term retention. PISCEs and LEADS began in 2022-23. BU's physician assistant students take PISCEs with you.

Each module is divided into learning periods of two to three weeks. You start with guided self-learning and apply it in required sessions built on patient cases. A consolidation session then revisits the opening cases before a Learning Progress Assessment, a multiple-choice exam on applying the material. Running through every course is The Core, which the school's Core page lists as 41 common presenting complaints and 15 patient types.

Doctoring builds clinical skills, from interviewing and examination to documentation and clinical reasoning. LEADS adds health equity, advocacy and scholarly methods, and PPD, new in 2025-26, pairs you with a coach for learning strategies, teamwork, wellbeing and careers. In the clerkships, teaching moves to wards and clinics, with regular didactic days, simulations and small groups.

In two sample pre-clerkship weeks posted on the Curriculum Overview page in 2022, days run from 8 am to 4:30 pm with an hour for lunch. The 2026-27 course guides use the same session types. Early in a learning period, mornings are for guided self-learning and recorded lectures, with knowledge self-assessments due before the sessions that use them.

Midweek mornings bring the required application sessions, team-based learning and small- or large-group cases, plus optional open discussion with faculty. At the end of a two-week period, a consolidation session on Thursday is followed by a Learning Progress Assessment on Friday morning.

Afternoons are less scheduled. Your Doctoring group meets on one of the Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday afternoons, one afternoon is set aside for patient care, and the rest is self-study.

Anatomy is not a stand-alone course but one of the threads woven through the PISCEs modules. What follows comes from school pages of different dates.

The most recent is the 2026 fourth-year elective catalog. It describes donor prosection, in which bodies are dissected in advance so structures are ready to study, for lab teaching in three PISCEs modules. These cover the head and neck in August, the thorax, abdomen and pelvis in September, and the back and limbs from late October to mid-November.

A 2022 school news story on the renovated 10th-floor Gross Anatomy Lab said up to 45 donor bodies were used each year by 309 to 370 medical and dental students. It said students used an Anatomage virtual dissection table, ultrasound units and a 3D program showing more than 2,000 structures to prepare before dissecting.

Fourth-year electives go further. A head and neck elective pairs morning classes with afternoon team dissections, and a Clinical Anatomy elective uses guided dissections based on real surgical approaches. Fourth-years can also earn credit helping prepare and teach the PISCEs labs. Some rising second-years prepare full-body prosections, usually in June, as Anatomy and Ultrasound Medical Educator Fellows.

Your first regular clinical work is the fourth-year preceptorship, 10 weekly sessions from August to November of year 1. With a first-year partner you interview patients admitted to BMC, discuss the topic of the week with your fourth-year preceptor and write notes for feedback.

From November to April you also practice with trained simulated patients, on skills such as dietary recall, screening for food insecurity and substance use, and focused histories. From February to May, the longitudinal preceptorship gives you 8 to 10 sessions, about 30 hours, in an outpatient practice with a faculty or resident clinician. Many are in family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics or emergency medicine.

In year 2 you see your longitudinal preceptor again in the fall, for about 15 hours. In the winter you return to the hospital for Clerkship Prep, five or six half-day sessions in which you take a full history and exam, present the patient and write it up. The school says pre-clerkship clinical work is at BMC or at sites reachable by public transportation.

In the clerkships, supervisors are told to start you on four or five focused clinic visits a day in your first week, rising to 6 to 12. On the wards you start with one or two patients and build to three or four.

Courses in years 1 and 2 are graded pass/fail. To pass a PISCEs course you need 75 of 100 points from open-ended questions, the team-based learning tests and the Learning Progress Assessments, held every two to three weeks. Under 70% on any Learning Progress Assessment means a re-exam. You also need 80 of 100 points for finishing practice work on time, such as UWorld board-review questions and DxWisely cases.

Clinical skills are tested in OSCEs, observed exams in which you interview and examine standardized patients. Doctoring 1 has assessments in modules 1 and 3 and a head-to-toe physical exam in module 2 that needs 85% to pass. Doctoring 2 has communication stations in August, two patient stations plus a test on spotting findings such as murmurs in October, and a three-station summative exam in January or February. Your AME's evaluation carries the most weight in the Doctoring 2 grade.

BU's MD is accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), which accredits MD programs in the United States. The LCME directory lists the program as fully accredited, and the school's next survey visit is set for February 1 to 3, 2027. For MD students, that accreditation is what establishes eligibility to sit the USMLE.

Step 1 tests the science behind medicine and has been reported only as pass or fail since January 26, 2022. You must sit it before the Transitional Clerkship starts and pass it before the fourth year. If you fail, your clerkships pause until you retake it. The promotion policy lets you finish the rotation you are on, and the third-year page says you either step out of your first rotation or drop your second.

In August 2026 the USMLE program announced a move to designated testing dates from January 2029, with Step exams offered less often each year. On the current schedule, a student entering in 2027 would finish classes in about mid-February 2029 and sit Step 1 between about late February and early April 2029, after the switch. Step 2 CK, which the promotion policy requires you to take by November 1 of your final year, would be due by November 1, 2030. The USMLE's June 2026 announcement had named 2028.

Clerkships and fourth-year rotations are graded Honors, High Pass, Pass or Fail, though the emergency medicine and radiology selectives are pass/fail. Clinical evaluations make up 60% of the grade in five of the seven core clerkships. The NBME shelf exam on the last Friday counts for 25% in all of them, and most of the rest comes from clinical reasoning exams, OSCEs or presentations. Summary narratives go into your Medical Student Performance Evaluation, part of every residency application.

• End of Third Year Assessment, in March of year 3: you must complete it before any fourth-year course, and a fail means a retake and clinical coaching in the fourth year.
• Medicine: oral and written clinical reasoning exams (12% in all) and an observed history and physical exam (3%). Surgery: an OSCE with trained actors (10%) and a recorded presentation (5%).
• OB/GYN: an oral exam (10%) and an evidence-based medicine talk (5%). Pediatrics: an oral clinical reasoning exam (7%). Psychiatry: an OSCE (10%). Neurology: a written clinical reasoning exam (10%) and a short talk (4%).
• Family medicine: a group OSCE and a virtual telehealth OSCE with a progress note, plus an evidence question graded by the medical librarian.

Boston Medical Center is the hub. It hosts teaching in most clerkships, and the fourth-year sub-internship and geriatrics clerkship must be done there. BMC Brighton, formerly St. Elizabeth's Medical Center, and BMC South in Brockton, formerly Good Samaritan Medical Center, belong to the same health system.

Beyond BMC, students rotate through the VA Boston Healthcare System at West Roxbury, Jamaica Plain and Brockton, the Bedford VA hospital and the outpatient Manchester VA in New Hampshire. Shuttle buses run from the medical campus to the Jamaica Plain and West Roxbury VAs. Other students go to community and psychiatric hospitals around eastern Massachusetts, and family medicine and some pediatrics rotations are in community health centers and private practices.

Some sites are far enough away to come with housing. Roger Williams Medical Center in Providence, Rhode Island, 49.9 miles from campus, provides housing on the medicine clerkship. Psychiatry students at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, 137.6 miles away, live at BU's Tanglewood Mansion, and Fuller Hospital students can use housing in Providence. Neurology students at the Manchester VA stay there, with housing, for about two weeks of outpatient clinics.

Sites are assigned through the eValue lottery in December of the second year. For each clerkship and the selective you rank up to five preferences by site, block or both, and results come at the end of January. A comments box lets you note special circumstances, such as becoming a parent or a wish for a rural rotation in the Berkshires. Site changes afterward need a request at least 30 days ahead, or 75 days for a VA site.

You apply for the Kaiser campus in the fall of year 2. The program's FAQ, last updated in 2023, says a Kaiser committee selects students in good academic standing, giving full-year applicants preference, and that Kaiser students' orientation and end-of-year assessment are held in Boston. That FAQ said students arranged their own housing; the 2026-27 medicine syllabus says housing is provided and a car is required.

The third-year selective is your first real choice. Emergency medicine is shift work in the BMC emergency department and runs only in certain blocks. Radiology, offered in every block, mixes reading-room observation, simulation and virtual PACS, the imaging software radiologists use. The research selective is four weeks of full-time, in-person work with a mentor and needs a separate application.

Beyond the sub-internship and geriatrics, the promotion policy and fourth-year guidelines require 28 weeks of electives, and at least 24 of the 36 required fourth-year weeks must be clinical. At least 8 weeks must come from the BU catalog and no more than 20 from outside it. No more than 12 weeks can be non-clinical, such as research or teaching, and no more than 16 can be in one subspecialty.

The catalog runs from anatomy and pathology to surgical subspecialties, global health, teaching, public health and Kaiser electives, and you can take an elective only after the core clerkship in that field. Sub-internships include family medicine, medicine, intensive care, gynecology, maternal-fetal medicine, pediatrics, neonatology, emergency medicine, several surgical services, orthopedics, ENT and neurosurgery.

Away rotations, electives at other schools, are arranged through the Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO) service of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) at LCME-accredited US schools, or with faculty approval outside it. Global health electives need Medical Education Office approval; recent options have included Ayurvedic medicine in Bangalore, India, and Tibetan and Himalayan medicine in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Research is optional at BU, according to its admissions FAQ, but scholarly work is built in: the LEADS advocacy piece in year 1, the year-2 group project and poster, and the fourth-year longitudinal requirement.

The LEADS Research Track selects students in the fall of year 1, with acceptances in December, and you need a BU faculty mentor before applying. You then research for about 10 to 12 hours a week through years 1 and 2 and form an advisory committee of three faculty. The track includes the seven-week summer research program and ends with a poster at the Medical Student Research Symposium.

Other options are the summer program on its own, the third-year research selective and fourth-year research electives of 4, 8 or 12 weeks. A research year at BU, between years 2 and 3 or years 3 and 4, adds a fifth year; you stay enrolled and a scholarship covers the research tuition. There is also a half-year program, and research years elsewhere are taken as a leave of absence.

The MD/PhD is BU's Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), which in 2025 won its first MSTP training grant from the National Institutes of Health. It takes at least seven years and eight on average. You complete the first two medical years and pass Step 1, do lab rotations and a PhD in one of 14 departments or programs, then take a transition course, MD800, before the clinical years.

The MD/MPH with the School of Public Health generally takes five years, with MPH courses between the third and fourth medical years. The MD/MSCR in clinical research also takes five, as does the MD/MBA in health sector management with the Questrom School of Business. MD/MBA students spend the fourth year full time on the MBA. The MD/JD with the School of Law takes six; the six-year MD-integrated oral and maxillofacial surgery program is for dental graduates.

The Rod Hochman Family Clinical Skills and Simulation Center fills 13,500 square feet on the sixth floor of the Instructional Building. It has four emergency and hospital rooms, 13 standardized patient exam rooms and 13 clinical skills labs, with high-fidelity manikins and ultrasound devices. Doctoring physical exam sessions and clerkship exams such as the surgery OSCE take place here.

Pre-clerkship written exams are taken in person in the L-11 testing center, and the emergency medicine selective holds its high-fidelity simulation in the Solomont Simulation Center in the Moakley Building basement.

Your core advisor is the AME assigned in year 1. They meet you individually at least once a semester, host a group meal for advisees each semester and help with research, summer plans and careers.

Student Affairs deans offer personal and career guidance, field-specific advisors guide you through choosing and applying to residency, and peer advisors from the class above help new students settle in.

The Academic Enhancement Office runs the board review program for Step 1 and Step 2, including review sessions, study schedules and the CBSSA. It also offers free peer tutoring, help with disability accommodations and study skills workshops. In every clerkship block, student-led Learning Environment Sessions pass anonymous feedback to clerkship directors, and mistreatment can be reported to the Appropriate Treatment in Medicine committee.