The Wright State Boonshoft School of Medicine MD program

The WrightCurriculum aims to make you a self-directed learner who weighs evidence, with biomedical science joined to clinical practice in both phases.

Faculty use class time to probe your understanding and correct misconceptions. The curriculum FAQ says the design rests on studies showing that active learning, practice testing and spaced recall work better than lectures.

At orientation you join a team of six or seven classmates for Team-Based Learning through the whole Foundations phase, and later a separate group for WrightQ. Teams are never required to do projects outside class. Year 1 also includes workshops on effective learning, note-taking, reading, test-taking and time management.

In the Doctoring phase, faculty preceptors and residents supervise you in hospitals and clinics and assess you through clinical evaluations. Your class still meets twice a month for Clinical Medicine Doctoring during the clerkship year, and monthly in the final year for Clinical Medicine Advanced Doctoring, which prepares you for residency.

On the 2026-27 block calendars, Monday through Thursday belong to the current Foundations module, such as Origins or Staying Alive. Friday is Clinical Medicine day in both year 1 and year 2.

Module days are made up of Peer Instruction and Team-Based Learning sessions and, from Staying Alive onward, WrightQ cases. The 2025-26 calendar gave first-year students a seven-week summer break from June 1.

Under school policies updated in April 2026, Peer Instruction sessions are graded and count toward each module's engaged-learning grade, and seats are assigned at random. Team-Based Learning readiness tests start at the scheduled time. If you arrive late you score zero on the individual test, unless you use one of the module's allowed absences.

The Foundations absence policy highly recommends attending every session. WrightQ, anatomy lab, the Scholarship in Medicine research module, sessions with other health professions, patient presentations or panels, and interview and examination skills sessions are generally mandatory. Each module allows about 0.3 days of absence per week of its length, so four days in a 12-week module. Scholarship in Medicine allows one absence, and Clinical Medicine allows four missed days in year 1 and two in year 2.

A July 2025 policy caps Doctoring-year absences at seven days, at most two in a six-week clerkship and one in a four-week clerkship; exam days and a clerkship's last clinical day are off limits.

You learn anatomy by dissecting, in two required modules. Human Architecture I, five weeks from the end of August on the 2026-27 calendar, introduces the language of anatomy, imaging and embryology. You dissect the thorax in detail, preparing for Staying Alive.

Human Architecture II opens year 2 with four weeks of further dissection, including the neck, abdominal wall and pelvis, ahead of the remaining systems modules. Human Architecture I is the only module you can repeat over the summer, and a repeat of Human Architecture II must be finished before you take Step 1.

The anatomy lab, in the Gandhi Medical Education Center in White Hall, has an integrated audio-video system. The same building houses the school's Anatomical Gift Program, a whole-body donation program founded in 1975 that holds a yearly ceremony of appreciation. In the final year, an Academic Medicine elective in anatomy lets you serve as a teaching assistant for both Human Architecture modules.

Clinical Medicine I opens year 1 with Upstream Medicine, which introduces Dayton's communities, the social factors that shape health and the local agencies that help patients. After that you practice interviewing and physical examination with standardized patients before any clinical rotation. You are tested in Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), timed stations where you interview or examine a standardized patient while being scored, and in simulated patient encounters (SPEs). Required Foundations sessions also include patient presentations or panels with patient volunteers.

Across Foundations you also complete 16 hours of service learning, with a written reflection, and required activities with students from other health professions, which continue in the Doctoring year. The summer after year 1 is open: the school lists Area Health Education Center (AHEC) experiences, global health, research or time off as options.

Real patients become your daily work once the first clerkship block starts in April of year 2, after the two-week Doctoring Bootcamp of just-in-time training in the skills clerkships demand.

Some tracks add earlier clinical time. Rural Pathway students spend the summer after year 1 with a family physician through an AHEC experience. MD in Three students do four weeks of clinical work that summer and two half-days a month of clinical experience and mentoring in year 2.

The WrightCurriculum is graded pass/fail, with 70% needed to pass and no rounding. Foundations modules appear on your transcript only as Pass or Fail, while Doctoring-year clerkships and Clinical Medicine Doctoring are graded Honors, Pass or Fail. Faculty narrative comments from rotations go into your permanent record and matter for your Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE), the school's letter to residency programs.

Foundations has a multiple-choice exam every two to four weeks, taken alone and then with a small group. Each module ends with an individual final, usually an NBME exam. Most modules require a cumulative 70% to take the final, and you get one retake of a failed final. From July 2026 you can retake finals in only two modules a year, and needing more sends you to the Student Promotions Committee with a recommendation to repeat the year.

Foundations has three final OSCEs, in interviewing and physical examination at the end of year 1 and a simulated patient encounter in year 2. Clinical Medicine Doctoring adds a bootcamp OSCE and two mid-year OSCEs, which must average 70%, and the final year opens with one more.

To pass a clerkship you need 70% across graded work, at least 58.33% on clinical evaluation items, professional behavior, and completed workshops and patient logs. Honors means consistently exceeding expectations, with no below-expectations ratings from preceptors. A 2017 clerkship policy, still on the school's current policy list, names NBME subject exams, known as shelf exams, among clerkship assessments. The NBME Comprehensive Clinical Science Examination (CCSE), a broad test of clinical science, feeds into reviews of Doctoring-year performance.

You must take USMLE Step 1 between the start of the six-week study block and the last Saturday before Doctoring Bootcamp. Step 2 CK must be taken between the start of the Advanced Doctoring Bootcamp and December 15 of the final year, and passed before the school certifies you for the residency Match. 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 student entering in summer 2027, in the Class of 2031, would take Step 1 in about February to March 2029, shortly after the switch. Step 2 CK would fall between the Advanced Doctoring Bootcamp in spring 2030 and December 15, 2030. These are projections from the 2025-26 and 2026-27 calendars, and the USMLE has encouraged schools to review rules that fix when students test.

• Excellence Across Foundations and Excellence Across Clerkships each go to at most 25% of the class, and the clerkship award appears on the transcript.
• A passed retake or repeat is recorded at the minimum passing grade, and if you repeat a failed module or clerkship, the original F stays on the transcript.
• Passing Step 1 is required for promotion, though you can start clerkships while your score is pending. If you fail after starting, you finish or withdraw from your current clerkship to prepare again. Without a pass by the start of Doctoring Block 3, you are referred to the Student Promotions Committee, which may have you repeat year 2.
• You must finish each phase within three academic years, and the whole MD, outside dual degrees, within six years of matriculation, including any leave.

The school's clinical departments are based in the community, and more than 1,280 community physicians and other professionals teach as voluntary faculty. Its Major Teaching Hospitals page, with hospital details from 2013 to 2018, lists hospitals in Dayton, Kettering and Xenia (Greene Memorial, now Kettering Health Greene Memorial) and on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Two rural hospitals, in St. Marys and Coldwater, complete the list.

Under the Doctoring Scheduling policy, last revised in 2019, a computerized lottery builds each student's schedule, and the Office of Student Affairs confirms clerkship assignments by February 28 before the Doctoring year. Assignments can still change with hospital or faculty capacity. You can formally request a different site in writing within a month of assignments being released.

The current final-year catalog shows where senior rotations happen. The emergency medicine clerkship and many sub-internships, from critical care and neurology to obstetrics and trauma surgery, are at Miami Valley Hospital, which the catalog calls a Level 1 trauma center. Internal medicine sub-interns may instead go to Kettering Health Main Campus, Kettering Health Miamisburg or the Dayton VA, and pediatric sub-internships are at Dayton Children's Hospital.

Rural rotations run through Wright Rural Medical Scholars (WRMS), funded by Ohio AHEC money, which works with the Lake Campus. Grand Lake Health and Mercer Health offer rotations in family medicine, pediatrics, general surgery and surgical subspecialties, and students on their clerkships can live at the Lake Campus. Wayne HealthCare and St. Rita's provide student housing, and students outside the pathway can take stand-alone rural experiences.

Beyond the summer AHEC experience, the Rural Pathway puts your family medicine clerkship and at least half of another clerkship at approved rural sites. At least one elective is rural, and it may be an away elective, taken at another institution. Your scholarly work needs a rural theme or a rural mentor, and you attend at least half the Advocates for Rural Medicine meetings during Foundations.

Electives run through both clinical years, and final-year electives come from a catalog of more than 150 Boonshoft courses. Titles range from Clinical Cardiology and Sleep Disorders to Food Is Medicine, Physicians and the Holocaust and a Surgical Boot Camp.

Limits keep the final year balanced. You can take at most 20 weeks of away electives and 16 weeks of student-initiated electives, which you design yourself. Two-week electives are capped at 16 weeks, repeats of the same elective at 12 and non-clinical electives at eight. Some sub-internships, such as internal medicine and neurology, are kept for applicants in that field in blocks 1 to 5.

For an away elective, which the school calls an extramural elective, you apply to the host, often through the Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO) service. Under a 2019 policy you need Boonshoft's approval 60 days ahead, or 90 for international electives. Student-initiated electives can be clinical, research or longitudinal, subject to approval.

Under 2019 policies you start planning the final year in December of the Doctoring year and finish your schedule in February. The school urges you to spend at least half your final-year elective time on a broad range of interests. In Dayton Street Medicine, a longitudinal elective, you spend Thursday afternoons through the year on a mobile unit stationed at the Dayton Dream Center, plus outreach events and resource fairs.

Every student can take a global health clinical elective of two, four or six weeks in the third or fourth year, at a partner site abroad or with the Indian Health Service. Spanish may be needed at some sites.

First-year students can apply to the Global Health Scholars Program, which comes with a graduation award. It adds global health courses in years 1 and 2, an international service trip the summer after year 1, a further elective abroad or at home and scholarly work. Scholars may do up to two rotations with international partners. It cannot be combined with MD in Three.

Every student takes Scholarship in Medicine in year 1, plus two self-paced biostatistics modules. For further research, the Office of Research Affairs keeps a database that links students to projects and mentors, and all student research must be supervised by a faculty member. The annual Research Symposium accepts up to 120 posters; its fifth meeting was in April 2026.

The MD/PhD takes seven years and is run with the College of Science and Mathematics through the Biomedical Sciences PhD Program. Years 1 and 2 are the Foundations curriculum with summer research rotations, seminars and journal clubs, ending with Step 1. Years 3 to 5 are PhD research and the thesis defense, and years 6 and 7 complete the clinical curriculum and Step 2.

The Physician Leadership Development Program (PLDP) leads to an MBA or MPH. The MBA, from the Raj Soin College of Business, takes three semesters, with a choice of concentrations and an optional hospital administration internship. The MPH, from the school's own program, also takes three semesters of evening courses in person, hybrid or online, with an applied practice experience, a research capstone and a global health option.

The PLDP prefers to admit students in year 1, considering later applicants case by case. Under its 2023 policies you can take an approved clinical elective during the graduate year, then rejoin the Advanced Doctoring class. The program is not compatible with the military's Health Professions Scholarship Program.

The MD/MS in Pharmacology and Toxicology, Clinical Investigation Concentration, offers hands-on clinical research at the Pharmacology Translational Unit in the Wright State Physicians Health Center on campus. It needs 26 semester hours of pharmacology and toxicology coursework plus 4 credit hours counted from medical school courses. The program page places the coursework in two semesters, between years 1 and 2 and between years 2 and 3. Places are limited, there is no thesis, and the MS is awarded after the MD.

The Ramesh K. Gandhi Medical Education Center in White Hall, on the Wright State campus, was built in 1981 as an ambulatory care center and remodeled as a medical education center in 2008. It has two lecture halls with large screens and remote-conferencing cameras, the anatomy lab and a student lounge open 24 hours a day. The Department of Medical Education and the Office of Student Affairs and Admissions are based there.

White Hall also houses the Skills Assessment and Training Center, which runs the standardized patient program the school has had since 1980. Its standardized patients portray set histories and findings and give you immediate feedback. The Department of Emergency Medicine's Center for Immersive Medical Education and Research (CIMER), set up in 2006, has two simulation labs with task trainers and high-fidelity patient simulators.

The 2026-2030 strategic plan commits the school to modernizing anatomy and simulation resources, adding artificial intelligence to the curriculum and studying whether the MD class could grow. It also plans a simulation consortium with the Dayton VA, Dayton Children's and Premier Health, a regional health system.

The Department of Medical Education tracks every student's results. Its Learning Support Team, made up of a Director of Learning Support, an academic advisor who runs peer tutoring and a learning specialist, contacts you if a module is going badly. If your average on individual exams falls below 70%, or one exam falls below 60%, you go on monitoring status and must meet the team to build a study plan.

Trained peer tutors offer individual and small-group sessions, usually weekly, and exam reviews are open to everyone. In the Doctoring phase, clerkship directors, preceptors and residents are the first source of help. A struggling student may be given a faculty academic mentor or a non-graded clerkship to work on specific weaknesses.

For careers, a career services advisor helps with specialty choice, CVs and personal statements as often as you like. Once you choose a specialty you are assigned a specialty advisor, a faculty member in that field who guides your residency application, program choices, interviews and rank order.

Medical students get free sessions with a licensed professional counselor and free psychiatric appointments for evaluation and medication management, coordinated by the Director of Medical Student Mental Health. In the winter of year 1 you can join the Healer's Art, a noncredit course of five evening sessions on finding meaning in medicine, and completing it adds a letter to your MSPE file. At the White Coat Ceremony every student signs the student-written Honor Code.