The Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science MD program

Phase I opens with Scientific Foundations of Medicine, which covers the biochemistry, cell and molecular biology, histology, genetics, embryology, pathology and physiology behind health and disease. Clinical Foundations of Medicine runs alongside, introducing models of care and core clinical skills. Eight system blocks follow: Infection-Immunology-Hematology, Skin, Gastroenterology and Cardiovascular-Pulmonary-Renal in Year 1, then Musculoskeletal, Neurobehavioral Health, Endocrine-Reproductive and Multisystem in Year 2.

Science and clinical medicine are taught together inside each block. Each week is organized around a patient presentation and the key decision points in reaching a diagnosis. The Skin block, for example, mixes large and small group sessions, online modules, labs and case studies, and the Musculoskeletal block adds lectures.

Some teaching spans all four years. Principles of Professionalism, Health Care, and Health Equity (P2H2) prepares you for medicine's social and cultural setting through lectures, small groups, patient panels and written reflections. The school's 4-Year Schematic also lists eight threads woven through the curriculum, among them team-based care, humanities, ethics and population health.

Foundations for Interprofessional Practice, in the fall and winter of Year 1, is required of first-year students in RFU's clinical programs; more than 500 took it in 2024-25. In Years 3 and 4 you learn on clinical teams at affiliate hospitals and clinics.

Under the school's 2023 pre-clerkship policy, scheduled work in Phase I is capped at 30 hours a week, averaged over each term, counting classes, labs, online modules and assigned preparation. At least two half-days a week, eight hours in all, are protected for independent study within the weekday 8 am to 6 pm window. Schema cases take two hours on Mondays and Fridays.

Anatomy is taught by cadaveric dissection. Clinical Anatomy (MCBA 500) runs through the fall quarter of Year 1 and the first weeks of winter. In the lab you dissect human cadavers region by region, working through the whole body, while lectures explain how each part is built and how it works. Some lectures are given by clinicians, linking the anatomy to patient care.

The John J. Sheinin Gross Anatomy Laboratory has 40 workstations, each with a surgical light, a cadaver tank, dissection tools and an iPad for course notes and dissection videos. It also holds bone and organ specimens for independent study and a synthetic SynDaver muscle model, and the Anatomy Resource Center adds an Anatomage table and a laparoscopic trainer.

The nervous system's anatomy returns in Year 2 in Neurobehavioral Health. Advanced Regional Anatomy Dissection gives Year 2 students up to 20 hours on one or two regions of their choice. Other electives cover brain dissection, dissection-based anatomy for students pursuing surgical careers, and work as a lab teaching assistant, helping with dissection and lab exams.

Your first patients come in Year 1, through observerships in Clinical Foundations of Medicine. Between late October and mid-May you spend four four-hour sessions at clinical sites, as half or full days. You watch how a physician evaluates and manages patients; first-year students are not expected to evaluate patients on their own.

Skills practice runs alongside: history-taking and examination in Essentials of Clinical Reasoning, and standardized patient workshops for first-year students, with feedback. During your preclinical years you can also volunteer at the Interprofessional Community Clinic.

Year 2 ends with the Clinical Skills course. You read EKGs and imaging, work with virtual patients, manikins and standardized patients, and write progress notes. You also practice procedures such as nasogastric tube placement, oxygen delivery, sterile scrubbing and gowning, and urinary (Foley) catheter insertion. Full-time clinical work starts in Year 3, once you have taken Step 1, the first exam of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), which tests the basic sciences behind medicine.

Phase I courses are graded pass or fail, but your work still earns raw scores, and 69.50% or above is a pass. After Year 2 the scores are combined, weighted by credits, into a Basic Science Tally that stays off your transcript and is used for honors such as the Distinction in Basic Science. The 2026-27 catalog says CMS keeps no GPA, using tallies like this one instead.

Phase I assessment uses multiple-choice exams, written work, projects, presentations, lab exams, skills demonstrations and direct observation. Faculty also write narrative comments on your small-group, lab and simulation work, and every course of four weeks or more gives you feedback by its midpoint.

Each clerkship ends with an NBME subject exam, a national end-of-rotation test often called a shelf exam. Your grade combines the exam, worth a third, with clinical evaluations of patient care and knowledge, professionalism and communication, worth two-thirds. Exam honors needs the 80th national percentile and high pass the 40th. Grades are criterion-based, so everyone who meets a standard gets that grade.

The CMS Clinical Skills Exam, which the curriculum chart calls the M3 Objective Structured Clinical Skills Exam, usually comes at the end of Year 3. An objective structured clinical exam (OSCE) is a set of standardized clinical encounters marked the same way for everyone. You take a history, examine and write a problem-focused note, scored for clinical reasoning and communication, and you must pass to graduate.

The USMLE is the series of three exams, or Steps, that state medical boards use in licensing doctors. For MD students, attending an LCME-accredited school is what makes you eligible for Step 1 and Step 2 CK. Students and graduates of osteopathic (DO) schools, and of eligible schools outside the United States, qualify through other routes. Step 1 has been pass/fail only since January 26, 2022, and CMS requires you to pass both Steps.

You must sit Step 1 after the Year 2 curriculum and before clerkships, by the end of the summer quarter, and pass it to continue clinical work. Step 2 CK is due within a year of finishing Year 3 and, if you enter the residency Match, by December 31 of that cycle. 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 2027 entrant's Year 2 spring quarter would run February 20 to May 11, 2029, with protected Step 1 study from about mid-March to late April. Step 1 would be due before clerkships begin, and no later than the end of the summer 2029 quarter; RFU's 2026-27 to 2028-29 calendars end summer quarters in late July.
• On the same schedule, Step 2 CK would be due by December 31, 2030 for Match applicants. Both exams would come after the January 2029 switch to designated testing dates.
• You get two attempts at each Step; a third needs approval from SEPAC, the school's promotions committee.
• Clerkships include a midpoint feedback meeting and one chance at remediation, capped at a pass. Six of the seven give you a day free of clinical duties in the week of the final exam.
• The sub-internship uses the same clinical evaluations without averaging: honors needs honors on all three.
• After Year 3, clerkship grades form a Clerkship Tally (honors 95, high pass 85, pass 75, weighted by credits). It sets the summary designator in your Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE), the school's letter to residency programs.
• The Clerkship Tally and the Basic Science Tally are then averaged into a Third-Year Tally, which may be used for honors such as nomination to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. Because Year 4 is mostly electives that differ from student to student, its grades feed no tally or ranking.
• You must complete the whole MD, 259.5 credits in all, within six years of starting. The 2026-27 catalog counts leave toward that limit, while the SEPAC Handbook excludes approved research or graduate study leave.
• The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) accredits MD programs in the United States. Its directory, updated October 14, 2026, lists CMS as fully accredited, first accredited on or prior to 1942, the year the LCME was founded, with its next survey in 2027-28. The school says its last full eight-year term was awarded in March 2021.

Clinical training runs through affiliate hospitals, clinics and private practices. The 2026-27 catalog lists more than 30 affiliates in Chicagoland and southeastern Wisconsin, many offering both inpatient and outpatient experience. Private physicians teach especially in the pediatrics and family medicine/primary care clerkships.

The school describes the mix as inner-city hospitals serving underserved patients, a federal health care center caring for U.S. military personnel, and private clinics and practices. It also cites Level 1 trauma center rotations and suburban and rural community clinic settings. The federal center, the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center, is in North Chicago.

Required clerkships and the sub-internship are at CMS affiliate sites, assigned by lottery. After an explanation in Year 2, you state preferences and receive a clerkship track, then sites, each followed by a one-week trading period. Later changes need an extenuating reason, such as a disability accommodation; transport problems and preference do not count.

Under a 2025 policy, sites more than 65 miles from campus qualify you for a travel stipend, subject to funds; closer sites and electives do not. You follow each site's holiday schedule. Work hours follow resident standards: at most 80 hours a week averaged over four weeks, one day in seven free, and in-house call no more than every third night.

In Year 2 you need 3 elective credits. The electives, offered in all three quarters, range from research and peer tutoring to clinical electives in radiology, orthopedics and dermatology. The summer after Year 1 is free for research or a global health elective at an approved site, which requires a patient log, essay or presentation.

In Year 3 the four-week elective defaults to emergency medicine, scheduled for every student in the Year 3 lottery. Eligible students can swap it for a career-exploration elective in a specialty they would not otherwise see that year, but the emergency medicine sub-internship requires the Year 3 emergency medicine elective.

Year 4 holds 30 weeks of electives, usually four weeks each. You need at least 12 weeks of CMS electives, at least 20 weeks of clinical electives, and at least four weeks in each of three of five specialty groups. The catalog says electives are available locally and throughout the United States, at health systems, residency programs, medical schools and private practices.

Away rotations, called extramural electives here, let you train at another medical school or health organization, which assesses you itself; you must be in good standing to go. Options beyond clinical rotations include teaching first- and second-year students, simulation-based education, clinical informatics, the business of medicine and medical Spanish.

Year 4 global health electives offer up to eight weeks of clinical, development or research work outside the United States and Canada, or time in another high-resource country's health system. RFU's approved CMS sites include a university in Xalapa, Mexico, which requires intermediate Spanish, and Hillside Health Care International's mobile clinics in Belize. Child Family Health International adds 35-plus sites in 10 countries, and sites under level 3 or 4 US travel advisories are suspended automatically.

The MD/PhD is run by CMS with RFU's School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, for students aiming at careers in academic medicine and research. You can apply at entry, or during Year 2 after successful research experience, such as research in the summer after Year 1. Either way you complete Years 1 and 2 and Step 1 first.

You then join a lab and form a research committee, which tailors your doctoral coursework around core requirements in bioethics, biostatistics, presenting data, scientific writing and computer applications. After defending your dissertation you return for Year 3. PhD fields are biochemistry and molecular biology, cell biology and anatomy, cellular and molecular pharmacology, microbiology and immunology, neuroscience, and physiology and biophysics.

About a third of students do research, in basic science labs on campus or clinical studies at affiliate hospitals. Summer research fellowships run between Years 1 and 2. Research electives also carry credit: eight weeks that summer (MCUR 618), part-time research in Year 2 (MFSH 600), and Year 3 and 4 research (MFSH 700 and MFSH 800). Off-site options include the Sinai Urban Health Institute and the Russell Center for Research and Innovation at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital.

The MD with Distinction in Research recognizes substantial original basic, clinical, epidemiological or educational research; a systematic review qualifies, preferably with meta-analysis, but a narrative review does not. You submit a three- to five-page proposal, meet a three-member faculty committee at least three times, present at a scientific meeting and defend a solo-author, journal-style manuscript. It appears on your transcript, not your diploma.

Distinction in Basic Science goes to students with a Basic Science Tally of 89.5% or higher, while Medical Education and Nutrition and Health Promotion require extra structured coursework and activities. The university-wide Distinction for Excellence in Interprofessional Healthcare accepts a limited number of students each year, each with a faculty mentor and a plan of interprofessional study.

RFU's campus covers 97 acres in North Chicago, less than two miles from the Lake Michigan shore, with on-campus housing, a fitness center, a cafe and athletic fields. The Boxer Library has 24-hour study space, a learning commons and quiet and silent study areas.

Simulation is run by the Department of Healthcare Simulation, accredited by the Society for Simulation in Healthcare, including for teaching and assessment. Its centers in North Chicago and at Northwestern Medicine Huntley Hospital form a Virtual Health System. Teaching uses manikins, task trainers, virtual patients and standardized patients, plus software tutorials on heart and lung sounds, EKGs and imaging.

The Standardized Patient program has run in the Education and Evaluation Center since 2003. According to RFU's Helix magazine in July 2026, its 72 standardized patients train students in nine RFU programs, including medicine, who spend about 40,000 hours a year with them.

Before orientation you are assigned at random to one of four Houses, each named after a notable CMS alumnus. A House holds all four classes; your class within it, about 50 students, is your learning community, one of 16. You stay in it for four years, with a faculty mentor, Student Affairs advisors and a programs coordinator.

Each community elects three student leaders in Year 1 to run its MedLEAD peer mentoring, LC CARES community engagement and LC Wellness programs. From Year 2 they join an Executive House Council that supports the House Cup and events such as Field Day, the Winter Formal and the Classroom to Clerkship Ceremony.

The Office of Student Affairs provides academic advising, four years of career and specialty advising, your MSPE and help through the residency Match. The Office of Medical Education runs a Step 1 advising and preparation program. Students who need more time take Academic Enrichment, a full-time Step 1 review course with check-ins and one-on-one advising.

An Early Academic Review Subcommittee watches for warning signs such as repeated low scores or missed deadlines and can recommend coaching, tutoring or wellness referrals. A Clinical Skills Optimization Team mentors students who need extra clinical skills work. In Year 3 you can take up to four personal or wellness days, two in each half of the year.