The Carle Illinois College of Medicine MD program

Teaching draws on faculty from 10 colleges of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and on Carle Health clinicians. Most Foundational Science courses are organized by organ system, so physiology, anatomy and pharmacology are learned together around a patient's case. The school's example: while you learn how the heart works, you also learn to examine a heart, read the data and follow a patient into cardiac rehab.

Problem-based learning is the backbone of these courses. Each week your small group works through one or two real cases and decides together what it needs to learn. After student feedback, the school cut these sessions from three to two a week and reduced the learning issues and assignments attached to them. Team-based learning runs in most courses, alongside active learning labs, flipped classrooms and lectures.

Engineering runs through the program: MEDI sessions, the engineering and innovation thread, and the IDEA course, which starts in Year 1 on the 2026-27 calendar and runs through the clinical immersion year. Interprofessional simulations put you alongside other health professionals, for example in emergencies or surgical teams.

The school's Second Look page links two sample weeks of cardiovascular teaching from autumn 2023. They show the rhythm of a pre-clerkship week, though timetables change from year to year.

Mornings held the classroom work: BiCEP from 8 to 10 on Mondays and Wednesdays, plus hour-long lectures and mini-cases. Each half of the class had one anatomy lab a week, on Tuesday or Thursday; in the first sample week the other half took an EKG session at the same time. Afternoons from Monday to Thursday were set aside for physical diagnosis in ICP, and Friday afternoons were left open.

School policy caps scheduled contact hours at 32 a week, and contact hours plus required preparation at 50, for classroom courses, ICP and Career Boot Camp. Each week must also keep at least two four-hour blocks free for self-directed learning.

• Wednesday: BiCEP, a mini-case session and a pharmacology lecture on antiarrhythmic drugs.
• Friday: lectures on pericardial disease and on how blood vessels regulate blood pressure, an anatomy table test, then Innovation Grand Rounds over lunch.

Anatomy is part of the Foundational Science courses rather than a course of its own. Most courses include an anatomy lab practical, and practicals run into Year 2: the 2025-26 exam schedule has one in Human Development and Reproductive Health. Weekly table tests are formative, meaning practice with feedback, and cannot be made up if you miss one.

The school lists online dissection guides with images among its curriculum updates, along with a longer anatomy ethics discussion in the Foundations course. Older news adds detail: a 2022 story said the lab begins within the first month, and a 2021 essay by a member of the first class described a year and a half of dissection.

Each class has held a memorial service for its donors at the end of its anatomy teaching, organized largely by students, with music, writing and art (school news, 2021 and 2022). Advanced Anatomy offers intensive cadaver dissection tied to your clinical interest, and Advanced Anatomy for Teaching trains you to teach in the lab. A virtual reality elective pairs dissection of a region you choose with VR.

ICP starts in your first weeks and runs until December of Year 2; on the 2026-27 calendar its first day was July 20, 2026, two weeks after orientation began. It opens with the basics of clinical work, such as taking a simple history and vital signs, understanding the team and talking with patients. It builds to full histories and physical exams, preoperative assessments and routine physicals. In Year 1 you practice physical diagnosis in clinic each week with the same physician preceptor.

From the start of Year 2 you also join the Family Medicine Continuity Clinic at Carle Champaign on Curtis, one evening a week, and stay until the end of the clinical immersion year. Under supervision, with responsibility growing over time, you do the work of a primary care physician for a panel of patients, managing chronic and acute problems. Missed sessions must be made up on your usual clinic weekday.

The Discovery Learning period at the end of Year 1 offers a Clinical Immersion option. It lets you spend time in one specialty, seeing how its doctors work and how patients experience care.

Foundational Science courses are graded Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory, which is pass/fail. Honors exists only in the required clerkships, where each clerkship sets its criteria so that about 20 percent of students earn it. Electives and sub-internships are pass/fail. A grade of Satisfactory after Remediation (SR) shows you passed after making up a failure.

Where a foundational course uses quizzes, they count toward your grade, with three attempts and the best score kept. Every course ends with a written exam on its last Friday, and courses longer than six weeks add a midterm. These run through NBME's Customized Assessment Services or another platform under NBME proctoring rules, with an individual performance report afterward.

The three NBME progress tests are Comprehensive Basic Science Examinations: ungraded, with an individual report each time. For summative OSCEs, the high-stakes ones that count, you must pass every skill tested, with up to three attempts per station. Each clerkship block ends with an OSCE, and the Gateway OSCE follows the clinical immersion year.

Each clerkship's NBME shelf exam counts toward your grade. You need to score at or above the national 5th percentile, and the shelf score needed for Honors can rise across the year. Faculty also add written comments, and you get formal feedback midway through every required course or clerkship of four weeks or more.

The USMLE is the exam series state medical boards use in licensing. Step 1, on the basic sciences, has been pass/fail since January 26, 2022, and Step 2 CK tests clinical knowledge; Carle Illinois requires you to pass both to graduate. Step 1 is due by a deadline before the Clinical Immersion year (March 4 in 2026, March 3 in 2027), and Step 2 CK by July 31, early in the final year.

In August 2026 the USMLE program announced a move to designated testing dates from January 2029, with Step exams offered less often each year. Its June 2026 notice had named 2028. On the current schedule, a student entering in July 2027 would face a Step 1 deadline in late February or early March 2029, just after the switch. The Step 2 CK deadline would fall around July 31, 2030, with both dates projected from the 2025-26 and 2026-27 calendars, the two the school has posted.

• Fail a summative written exam and you get one retake. If that fails, a remediation plan follows; success earns SR, and an unsuccessful plan goes to the Student Progress and Promotions Committee.
• Miss the Step 1 deadline and you can still start clerkships, but you must pass Step 1 to enter the final year, and graduation may be delayed.
• You must pass Step 1 within three years of starting, and complete the MD, including Step 2 CK, within six years.
• The USMLE program has asked schools to review rules that restrict when students take Step exams, so these deadlines may change.
• The LCME accredits MD programs in the United States. For MD students, LCME accreditation is what makes you eligible to sit the USMLE; DO students and international graduates qualify through other routes.
• The LCME directory, updated October 14, 2026, lists Carle Illinois as fully accredited, first accredited in 2017, with its next survey in 2027-28. Full accreditation came in March 2025, after provisional accreditation in 2021.

Carle Health, the school's founding clinical partner, serves nearly 2 million people across Illinois and western Indiana and provides the clinical experiences in all seven clerkship specialties. Its flagship, Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana, has 489 beds. It is a Level I Trauma Center, the highest level of trauma care, and a certified Comprehensive Stroke Center.

Carle BroMenn Medical Center in Normal, described in 2022 as a 200-bed Level II trauma center, became a second clerkship site in 2023. The directors page lists BroMenn leads for internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, neurology and psychiatry, and Urbana leads for all seven clerkships. In the clinical year that began in March 2023, 17 of 44 students were scheduled to do at least one clerkship at BroMenn.

A 2022 article said students at BroMenn would keep their continuity clinic patients, and the school has since added study and lounge space for them there. Clinical sites may be up to an hour's drive each way, and you arrange your own transport, so plan on a car.

Your clerkship order is set by lottery. You can ask to change your clerkship track, but approval is not guaranteed, and a change can push a clerkship into the final year and affect away-rotation eligibility.

Other sites appear in dated sources. A March 2025 story placed psychiatry students at OSF HealthCare's inpatient clinic or on Carle Health's psychiatric consult service. A May 2024 list of contacts for reporting exposures at affiliated clinical sites names Gibson Hospital, OSF HealthCare, Christie Clinic, Promise Health Care and Sarah Bush Lincoln alongside Carle locations. It is a contact list, not a rotation schedule.

Discovery Learning gives you six weeks at the end of Year 1 for electives, immersion experiences or vacation. The school's Discovery Learning page lists four options: Global Studies, ending in the Global Community Immersion Program; Clinical Immersion in a specialty; Research Immersion with university researchers; and Self-designed Study with a mentor.

Newer school sources use another name. The school's research updates page says Discovery Learning has been revamped as MORE3, with expanded opportunities, and its away-rotation policy calls these weeks the More3 period, into which any outside research must fit. The 2026-27 calendar still labels them Discovery Learning electives and/or vacation.

The final year centers on electives: 30 credit hours, at least 20 of them clinical, with the rest open to research, engineering or other approved work. You can take standing Carle Illinois electives, design your own with a faculty supervisor, or go elsewhere. The 2026-27 university catalog runs from Rural Surgery at a smaller community hospital and Addiction Medicine, including drug court in Champaign County, to Medical Device Product Development and Artificial Intelligence in Health.

You need at least one four-week sub-internship; extra ones count as electives, up to two in any specialty. The catalog lists sub-internships in general surgery, internal medicine, pediatrics, family medicine, neurology, obstetrics and gynecology, urology, anesthesiology, and inpatient and consult-liaison psychiatry.

Away rotations are arranged through VSLO, run by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), or directly with the host. Hosts can be in the US or abroad. To go, you must be in good standing and have passed every required clerkship, and the school needs an affiliation agreement with the host. A sub-internship can be done away if the host lists it as one and it meets the school's core features.

The MD/PhD Medical Scholars Program combines the Carle Illinois MD with a PhD from any doctoral program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Fields go beyond the biomedical sciences to engineering, the physical sciences, humanities and social sciences. You can apply once you are in the MD program. In Year 1 the Medical Scholars Program advises interested students as they explore PhD programs and potential advisors, and applications follow around the end of Year 1 or early in Year 2.

You finish the pre-clerkship curriculum and pass Step 1 before starting graduate work, then return for the Clinical Immersion year and final year. Up to 12 credit hours of medical coursework can count toward the PhD, and depending on your thesis the school may waive the capstone or data science requirement.

School policy also covers other degrees. If you start and finish a master's, PhD or similar degree after enrolling, from any institution, and it requires a thesis or similar deliverable, you can petition to waive the non-clinical elective requirement.

You must pass Step 1 before starting the degree, and leave taken for it, or for a graduate certificate, does not count toward the six-year limit. Carle Illinois helps run an online graduate certificate in Healthcare Innovation, Design, and Entrepreneurship (HIDE): three courses, from spotting needs to launching ventures, aimed at graduate students in medicine and others.

Every student completes a scholarly project: the Capstone Project, which grows out of the IDEA course, or the Data Science Project. In the data science route you pose a data-driven clinical question, find and analyze clinical or molecular data, and learn the rules on human subjects protection and data privacy. A 2026 team analyzed language in radiology reports to see whether it predicted complexity in orthopedic trauma.

Research support includes funding beyond the two projects, a REDI program with statistician support, a Director of Student Research and a yearly mentor-matching session at the MEdX conference. Clinical research mentors, physicians from a range of specialties, can guide your research and offer clinical projects; the school lists ten in October 2026. Each new student also receives a Healthmaker Coin, a restricted $10,000 endowment for research, innovation and prototyping (school news, July 2026).

Simulation happens at the Jump Simulation Center, in the lower level of Everitt Laboratory at 1406 W. Green Street, Urbana, also home to the Department of Bioengineering. Launched with a $10 million gift from Jump Trading, it provides all of the college's simulation training.

It has an ICU room with a working ventilator and code carts, and an operating room with a scrub station and surgical lights. There are also four patient rooms for adult or pediatric cases, a skills lab of task trainers, and four virtual reality stations for intubation, ECMO (a form of life support), sepsis and virtual anatomy. Exam rooms have two video cameras, so sessions can be watched live or reviewed later from your own computer.

Problem-based learning rooms are in the Learning Resource Center of the Medical Sciences Building, 506 S. Mathews Avenue, Urbana, which also has the MSB MakerSpace for early prototyping. You can also use the Siebel Center for Design, MechSE Makerworks, the Health Maker Lab network and the AxisMed Biomedical Pre-Incubator. Students have study and lounge space at Carle's Forum, and a workstation on wheels is reserved for them on Labor and Delivery.

Innovation Pods work like learning communities: small groups built for support and mentoring. You join a pod of eight students at the start, and it stays together for all four years, meeting regularly. Pod Mentors come from basic science, clinical and engineering faculty.

Each pod also has assigned clinical and student support advisors, and access to student, resident and retired faculty advisors. Pods are named after people linked to the university, such as Paul Lauterbur, whose work made MRI possible.

Thrive is a weekly, student-led 50-minute wellness session covering test-taking, career development, burnout prevention and stress management. In the clinical immersion year you also get three wellness days, no more than one per clerkship, and the calendar includes a fall Wellness Retreat.

A Director of Student Wellness, a licensed clinical social worker, offers emergency triage, case management and free therapy. Therapy is mostly short term but has no fixed session limit, and the therapist plays no part in assessing students. Referrals for psychiatric care go to providers where medical students are not rotating, to protect your privacy.

Peer Educators, current students at various stages of training, run group and one-to-one tutoring in foundational sciences, clinical skills and study skills. Academic support staff add time-management modules and a Step 1 roadmap, and the school extended students' UWorld question bank subscription for Step 2 CK and shelf study from 180 to 360 days.

Clinical career advisors and intranet specialty profiles, which list recommended electives and a Carle Health specialist to contact, help you plan for residency. A confidential Ombudsperson, who reports to the dean, holds office hours at Carle's Forum.