By looking at our students’ rate of achievement, one has to ask: Why are the PASS Program teaching methods so successful? The answer seems complex, yet its origins are rooted in simplicity – we are retraining your brain how to think. Instead of learning from the bottom-up, you’re learning from the top-down and the results are speaking for themselves.
The PASS Program has completely revolutionized the conventional way that students learn. It has quickly become the most effective way to improve skills in knowledge organization, knowledge integration, and short/long term memory, which translates to increased accuracy and higher test scores. In preparing for a career in medicine, too many students spent hours memorizing endless pathological situations and processes of the body. This is a less effective and less accurate technique, but it’s the way many people learned to educate themselves. But the days of flash cards are over, or at least they should be. We train our students to first focus on completely understanding the normal physiological processes of the body and the biochemistry involved in those processes. The more aware you become of that, the more patterns start to emerge.
This method of learning actually goes back to the earliest form of learning that the brain utilizes. Children begin learning language by merely repeating the words that they hear. Quickly, they begin to speak phrases and then sentences that no actual person had spoken to them before. Fundamentally, they pick up the patterns in formulating sentences consistent with the language that they have been exposed to thus far. This is why a child can easily learn and master multiple languages during this stage of life. This recognition of patterns is how we approach higher education. You will begin to do more than just understand the medical information. The mind will integrate it, reason with it, and extrapolate from it.
Imagine understanding how to figure out the signs and the symptoms for any disease, the infections that are likely as part of the disease, the complications of the disease, the causes of death for that disease, the drugs of choice for treating that disease, as well as how to manage the disease in the short and long term. We are empowering our students with these skills.
Our top-down technique to teaching begins with the final concept at the top of the pyramid, instead of starting with the myriad relatable facts and components that lead to that concept. Traditional education falters by spending too much time at the bottom of the pyramid and the students never reach a full understanding of what the true concept is. Effectively, we have turned the pyramid upside down. By understanding the concept first, the brain is able to connect an incredible amount of facts that are simply related to the main concept. In fact, the brain can create relationship patterns that allow it to integrate copious amounts of information to a specific problem.
Over 93% of our students succeed on their licensing examinations, with more than 80% receiving a score of 200 or better.
