The UMKC School of Medicine MD program

Science is taught through lectures, labs and small groups, and clinical skills through workshops and standardized patients, people trained to play patients or relatives. The school describes the docent system as apprenticeship combined with small-group teaching, mentoring and peer coaching, with nurses, pharmacists, librarians and social workers joining the docent in teaching. The curriculum is designed and managed by the school's Council on Curriculum.

In the Human Structure Function series, team-taught lectures are sequenced so that you study one organ system through five disciplines at once: anatomy, histology, embryology, physiology and biochemistry. Each course ends with a final exam.

From your first fall the teaching shifts to discipline courses. Pathology II, for example, combines lectures, digital labs, small groups and self-directed learning, and Clinical Practice of Medicine II teaches examination skills system by system in step with it. In year 2 the remaining science comes in compact block courses, while Patient, Physician and Society runs alongside your clerkships. A required nutrition thread of at least 40 hours runs through years 1 to 3.

St. Joseph students take the same pre-clinical courses but join most lectures remotely from Kansas City, while labs, team-based and problem-based learning, clinical skills and workshops happen in person on their campus.

In a typical pre-clerkship week, scheduled teaching and assessments, including online work done on your own schedule, should not exceed 25 hours under the school's workload policy. You are expected to spend about 15 more hours on self-directed learning, and the policy tells students in a professional program to be ready for a 60-hour working week.

On clerkships, duty hours are capped at 60 a week averaged over four weeks, including call, with one day in seven free. You should have 10 hours off between shifts and must have 8, and scheduled teaching on top of patient care averages no more than 12 hours a week. Your weekly half-day clinic continues during study blocks and during electives within 25 miles of the school.

Anatomy is taught inside the four Human Structure Function courses, with histology, embryology, physiology and biochemistry, so you learn each region's structure alongside how it works. The topics of each course are listed under Year 1 below.

The nervous system gets its own course in your first fall. Medical Neurosciences is lecture-based, but its laboratory is organized around brain dissection sessions that show gross lesions and connect them to clinical symptoms. Pathology I then returns to gross and microscopic anatomy through the lens of disease.

On the St. Joseph campus, the curriculum page lists anatomy labs, a cadaver lab and histology labs among the activities taught in person there. In Kansas City, the Experiential Learning Center holds more than 100 anatomical models and the Harvey simulator for pre-clinical courses.

Clinical experience starts in your first semester. Fundamentals of Medical Practice IV, beside the first three science courses, includes a standardized patient experience and weekly on-site docent sessions, where you tackle medical problems as a team with B.A./M.D. classmates. It also covers screening, health disparities, healthcare quality and safety, and physician wellness.

In Kansas City you join your docent team the August after you start. The 2022-23 handbook describes a White Coat Ceremony each August, where new students learn their team, docent, senior partner (a student two years ahead) and advisor. It also says you need Basic Life Support certification before clinic begins in September.

Year 2 brings your first full-time clinical work. On the Docent Rotation you round daily on internal medicine wards with your docent, residents and attending staff, paired with a senior partner. Family Medicine covers patients of every age in the context of their families and communities. Behavioral Science adds home health visits, supervised interviewing and time on an inpatient chemical dependency unit.

At St. Joseph, physicians at Mosaic Medical Center lead the first-semester docent experience. The Rural Continuing Care Clinic Clerkship then provides a weekly continuity clinic in years 1 and 2, mostly in St. Joseph but sometimes in nearby communities.

Service learning adds more patient contact. Medical students developed and run the Sojourner Clinic, a free outpatient clinic, and students also help at the Kansas City Free Eye Clinic. In the National Diabetes Prevention Program, students coach participants through a 22-session lifestyle and nutrition program.

The pre-clerkship science courses are graded A to F: the four Human Structure Function courses, Clinical Correlations, Medical Neurosciences, Medical Microbiology, and Pathology I and II. Their grades form a cumulative science GPA, and you need at least 2.8 in it, and overall, to move into year 2. The 2.8 overall GPA also applies at each later promotion and at graduation.

Clinical rotations and electives are graded either Credit/Pass or on a five-point scale: Fail, Marginal Pass, Satisfactory Pass, High Pass and Honors. The Docent Rotation, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, surgery, psychiatry, emergency medicine and Behavioral Science each end with a National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) subject exam. This shelf exam is a national multiple-choice test in that field. Fail one the first time and you cannot earn Honors or High Pass in that rotation.

Clinical skills are tested in high-stakes standardized patient exams and OSCEs in the Clinical Practice of Medicine courses, and core clerkships hold their own in the Clinical Training Facility. On the USMLE, Step 1 covers the basic sciences behind medicine and has been reported only as pass or fail since January 26, 2022. Step 2 CK tests clinical knowledge and keeps a three-digit score. You must pass both to graduate.

Step 1 comes in year 2. To sit it you must pass Pharmacology and Behavioral Science and score at least 66 (equated percent correct) on the NBME Comprehensive Basic Science Exam (CBSE). The school offers this practice exam in every block on both campuses. Four-year M.D. students have no undergraduate campus semester, so your timing follows your own pair of back-to-back study blocks. You take the CBSE in the first week of the first, and your first-attempt deadline is two blocks after the second ends.

Step 2 CK can be taken once you have passed Step 1 and completed your second Docent Rotation and the pediatrics, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology and psychiatry clerkships. Passing four of those five subject exams first time clears you to sit it; otherwise you take the NBME Comprehensive Clinical Science Exam (CCSE), where 218 or more clears you. You must sit Step 2 CK by December 31 of your final year, and the school strongly recommends mid-September.

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 announcement had named 2028. On the current schedule, a January 2027 entrant would start year 2 in late May 2028 and sit Step 1 between about autumn 2028 and spring 2029. So Step 1 could fall before or after the switch, depending on your schedule, while Step 2 CK would come around September 2030, after it.

• Most subject exams allow one retake within four blocks; failing again means repeating the rotation. The attempts you needed appear in your Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE), the dean's letter sent to residency programs.
• Clinical evaluations rate your professionalism; the lowest rating on 20% or more of them, or Marginal Pass or lower on more than half, fails the clerkship.
• You log your patient encounters weekly, and missing the end-of-clerkship deadline drops your grade one level, such as Honors to High Pass.
• If you do not sit Step 1 within six weeks of qualifying, you must qualify again, and you have three attempts to pass each Step.
• The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) accredits M.D. programs in the United States, and its accreditation is what makes students of an M.D. program like this one eligible to sit the USMLE. Its directory, updated October 14, 2026, lists this program as fully accredited, with its next survey shown as 2025-26.
• The school's own page says it was granted full accreditation for eight years in October 2018 and that its next site review would take place in April 2026.
• The 2027-28 and 2028-29 calendars are not yet published, and the USMLE has encouraged schools to review rules on when students must sit Step exams, so these timings could change.

In Kansas City your docent team rounds daily at University Health Truman Medical Center or Saint Luke's Hospital of Kansas City during Docent Rotations, and the weekly clinic runs at partner hospitals. Many doctors at the partner hospitals also hold faculty posts at the school.

University Health was called Truman Medical Centers until 2021. Its Truman Medical Center is a safety-net academic medical center treating patients with or without insurance, with 258 staffed beds and a Level 1 trauma center verified by the American College of Surgeons. Saint Luke's, founded in 1882, is a tertiary hospital with more than 630 beds and a Level I trauma center.

Children's Mercy Kansas City, a freestanding children's hospital, is a primary affiliate, as are the Kansas City VA Medical Center and the 590-bed Research Medical Center. The school names the Center for Behavioral Medicine, a 65-bed state psychiatric hospital on Hospital Hill, as a core psychiatry clerkship site.

St. Joseph students are based at Mosaic Life Care, whose 352-bed tertiary hospital anchors a system serving 35 counties across four states. Outside the LIC, their core clerkships and emergency medicine take place mainly at Mosaic Hospital in St. Joseph. They come to Kansas City for Family Medicine, alongside the school's family medicine residents.

Four-year M.D. students may ask to change campus after one semester. A committee meets twice a year to review requests, and they are considered only where the other campus has room.

In Kansas City the course list sets aside about five elective blocks in year 2 and three in each of years 3 and 4, plus a humanities or social science course. To graduate you need at least three clinical electives from three categories, one of them in critical care. The current policy, updated in February 2026, lists ten categories, with neurology and psychiatry counted separately.

A clinical elective earns credit only if it fills a full four-week block, with at least 160 hours (20 eight-hour days) and more than half of that time spent seeing patients. An approved clinical elective of about three weeks can be taken only not for credit. You can also take up to four supervised study or readings blocks. Non-clinical electives in research, academic topics or the humanities earn block credit but do not meet the clinical requirement.

The catalog lists sub-internships, in which you take on much of the work of a first-year resident. They cover family medicine, internal medicine, neurology, pediatrics, neonatal intensive care, obstetrics and gynecology, internal medicine-pediatrics, anesthesiology, emergency medicine and three surgical fields. Other options include pediatric subspecialties, trauma surgery, a Family Medicine Preceptorship with a rural Missouri physician and a four-week culinary medicine elective run with Saint Luke's Muriel I. Kauffman Women's Heart Center.

You arrange away (out-of-town) electives yourself, and any elective not already approved needs Council on Curriculum approval before it starts. In years 3 and 4 you may miss up to four blocks of clinic a year, enough for three away electives and a vacation. In year 2 you can take one. UMKC students are placed in local electives in March and October, ahead of visiting students.

Under the 2022-23 handbook, international clinical electives are open from year 2 to students in good standing, with docent, advisor and Council on Curriculum approval. The school has affiliated institutions in China, Austria and Mexico.

You can take two one-month research electives for credit, and many students also research on their own time. The Student Research Committee helps you find a mentor, either one you approach yourself or a guided match after a meeting with the associate dean for research or a committee member. The school recommends starting before your final year.

The Sarah Morrison Research Award has funded student projects since 2007, with up to $3,000 held by your mentor for expenses; applications close on November 15. Award holders present at the Health Sciences Student Research Summit, held each spring, or a similar event. The UMKC Rural Research Award funds student research in rural health.

For a full research year or an outside degree, you take an Academic Enrichment Leave, which covers research programs, advanced degrees and professional certification. It is noted on your MSPE but does not pause school deadlines, including the six-year limit for finishing the M.D. The school's research pages list outside year-long options such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Medical Research Scholars Program and a Frontiers TL1 year with a Master of Science in Clinical Research.

Clinical skills teaching in Kansas City centers on the Clinical Training Facility, a 5,100-square-foot space on the lower level of the campus parking structure on Hospital Hill and home to the Standardized Patient Program. It has four recorded exam rooms for OSCEs, two classrooms and the Youngblood Medical Skills Laboratory, whose four simulation areas are set up like emergency or intensive care rooms.

Inside the School of Medicine building, the 1,300-square-foot Experiential Learning Center has a patient exam room and a combined classroom and high-fidelity manikin room for up to 30, watched from a control room. A larger simulation center of about 12,000 square feet, with 14 exam rooms and a simulated operating room, is being built in the Healthcare Delivery and Innovation Building, due to open in spring 2027.

The St. Joseph Medical Education Building opened in August 2025 across the street from Mosaic's hospital, and St. Joseph classes moved there from Mosaic. Its 3,000-square-foot simulation center has four exam rooms, an acute care simulation room and a debriefing room, so St. Joseph students train without traveling to Kansas City. In Kansas City, the four docent units in the School of Medicine building and the Purple unit at Saint Luke's give each team offices and a meeting space.

Your ETC, a trained academic advisor attached to your docent unit, helps with scheduling, degree progress and policies and connects you with other help. Your docent mentors you clinically and professionally, and your senior partner adds peer mentoring; later you take that role for a new student.

Academic support covers tutoring and supplemental instruction, coaching from learning specialists and focused help with licensing exams. If you miss a readiness score or fail a Step exam, a USMLE counselor sets a preparation plan with you before your next attempt.

A wellness coordinator runs the wellness program, and the school offers free or low-cost medical services, including psychological and psychiatric care. Career Services guides you from choosing a specialty to the residency application, with free access to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Careers in Medicine program from your first fall.