True Tales of Medical School: The Gunner

June 21st, 2004

Filed under: Medicine

One of the banes of my existence as a medical student was the type of student known as a gunner. “Gunner” was the term for the medical student who sat in the front row and never missed a class. They used at least three different colors of ink to take notes, and their text books had more highlighting than text. They lived in the library going over their notes time and again. These were the students who would ask question to make themselves look good.

Some teachers loved gunners, some hated them, but most just put up with them. Remember, all of our teachers were medical students once themselves, so they know what being a gunner meant.

We had close to fifteen gunners in my class. Most of them were easy enough to ignore. One gunner, however, earned the enmity of our entire class. Her name was Becky. Socially, she was a very nice person. Put her in a classroom though, and she lost all of her social skills and became obsessively focused on the lecture and her grade. What set her apart from the other gunners was how she dragged the whole class down with her.

A perfect example of this was Gross Anatomy (the class, not the movie). After our first Anatomy exam, she told the professor that his questions were “too easy.” Take it from me, they weren’t too easy. I passed the test, and did modestly well, but it took all my meager skills to pull it off.

Becky’s comment offended Dr Y-, the Anatomy professor. He had been teaching Anatomy for thirty years, and was originally going to retire before my class started. No other professor could be found who was willing to teach anatomy though, so he stayed on to teach my class. He had this huge database of thousands of anatomy exam questions, each rated 1-5 (with 1 being easy and 5 being incredibly hard). A normal test was mostly questions rated 3, with some others thrown in for color. After Becky’s comments, the test questions went from an average of 3 to an average of 4 to 5. The class score dropped by over fifteen points. Thanks a lot Becky!

Sometimes, the teacher got the last laugh. One of our Histology exams had three “E: none of the above” answers in a row. After the test, Becky stormed up to the teacher and complained that the test was “educationally invalid” because of all the none of the above answers. The teacher merely nodded and smiled.

The next Histology exam featured two full pages of none of the above answers.

21 Responses to “ True Tales of Medical School: The Gunner ”

  1. Shane
    June 23rd, 2004 at 8:54 am

    Who the hell talks like that? “educationally invalid”?

  2. Scott
    June 23rd, 2004 at 1:10 pm

    And what kind of student would care? I was happy for some simpler question!

  3. Matt
    November 23rd, 2006 at 5:14 pm

    I’m second year physio in Australia and we have a girl who’s like that. I wouldnt mind however it gets to exam time and shes the type of person who will tell you the wrong answer on purpose to make sure she gets a higher mark…

  4. Ben Goldsmith
    December 8th, 2006 at 5:33 pm

    Listen, I dont know about this Becky, but all the gunners in my school are these F*ckin Indians who continuously kiss but and refuse to participate in study groups, they are competitive to a flaw, incredibly greedy, they all dream about how rich they are going to be when they land their cush dermatology residency. They smile to your face then during exam time they stab you in the back. My class has gotten fed up with them and is not conspiring against them, no one will share old exam questions with them in any class. It’s making them nuts. hehehe

  5. Maura
    January 13th, 2007 at 5:54 pm

    I’m a first year at MSU College of Vet Med. We have a student in our class who actually told one of my friends that she asks questions of the professors so that the “average” (ie - not her) student can have the material re-presented for them. What a dick!

  6. Med School Hell » Gunner Links
    March 18th, 2007 at 1:18 am

    [...] True Tales of Medical School: The Gunner [...]

  7. vijay
    March 18th, 2007 at 2:06 pm

    thats a nice one there… we too had many none of the above answers in our internals..

    http://www.medtape.blogspot.com

  8. JD
    March 31st, 2007 at 8:40 pm

    One of my friends goes to a Caribbean med school in Antigua. He’s described a student like that, she actually got the professor to readminister a Neuroanatomy exam for similar reasons.

    We’ve got maybe a dozen of these Gunners at my school, but for some reason ours seem to be mediocre students, they’re asking questions so they can study the minute trivial details rather than learning the actual concepts. I have a feeling that these are the ones that are going to grow up to be the doctors that could pick out ALS from a cursory exam but couldn’t diagnose Strep pharyngitis if it coughed in their face.

  9. Alok
    May 30th, 2007 at 9:49 am

    I am a med student in India, out of 150 students we have at least 30 gunners.
    One of them after taking a patho exam went home crying to her parents that she didn’t do well because the Patho dept. didn’t teach well enough. Her parents actually called the Head of Patho to complain and on the next exam less than 40% of the class passed. The audacity of some people!!

  10. Alok
    May 30th, 2007 at 9:53 am

    Being Indian I have to agree with Ben, Indians are selfish, greedy, kiss-asses especially the immigrants. US born are okay sometimes.

  11. PG
    July 21st, 2007 at 12:50 pm

    You missed out on how much fun such students could be. On our long lecture days, we used to play “Gunner Bingo” to help with the monotony… make a bingo board with the names of your favorite gunners, mark off the boxes every time your gunner made a comment or asked a question, and the winner gets bought drinks at Happy Hour.

  12. Angsuman Chakraborty
    September 5th, 2007 at 7:08 am

    Alok says> Being Indian I have to agree with Ben, Indians are selfish, greedy, kiss-asses especially the immigrants.
    That includes you too, in case you haven’t realized.

    Alok, speak for yourself. I was in US for several years, most of my career, and I do not concur with your experiences and neither with Ben’s.

    Ben says> F*ckin Indians…
    Ben, you definitively prove yourself to be a moron, enough said. Try to get some counseling for your pent up rage again Indians in US.

  13. Shelley
    October 5th, 2007 at 12:57 am

    We had gunners in law school, as well. My favorite was named “The Riddler” by his pod, because you could practically hear “Riddle me this, Batman” before he launched into each question.

  14. Indiandoc
    October 7th, 2007 at 10:51 pm

    Hehe. Its great when these nuts who act stud get what they deserve. One gunner I knew was repeatedly failed for 3 years because he acted stud in anatomy - told the prof her questions sucked and were below his “standard”

  15. arwen
    October 10th, 2007 at 2:41 pm

    Has anyone did any “follow-up” studies? What happens to these gunners after graduation? Which specialties do they end up with? How does their career development differ from the “non-gunners”? What about their family life?

  16. Tirithien
    October 11th, 2007 at 6:56 pm

    I’m an MS1, and gunners are starting to show up. One guy I know thought gunner was a compliment until I explained it as a person who would cut out someone’s liver for an extra point.

  17. Alok
    October 18th, 2007 at 8:45 am

    Angsuman Chakraborty: I am not an immigrant, I was born and brought up in the US and I am attending Medical school in India. Meeting Indians from both ends of the spectrum I can say that Indians in India are good people and so are Indians born in the US. But some Indians are pretty screwed up (from what I have noticed its usually immigrants who moved during their teenage years). If you haven’t encountered such people then good for you, but I am speaking from my own personal experience.

  18. Wanderer
    March 27th, 2008 at 4:21 pm

    Alok: While every ethnic group has its “bad apples”, Ben made no mention of that fact; he and his classmates are purposely restricting study material from the Indian students because they see them as “greey” and “dreaming of their cushy jobs”. Weighing in on his side, you have (I presume inadvertently) applied that prejudice to yourself; are you, then, greedy, grasping, and in medicine only because it can get you a cushy job?

  19. Psudo
    June 25th, 2008 at 5:17 am

    If white politicians can get elected by denouncing racism against racial minorities (read: non-whites), why criticize Alok who profits nothing?

  20. RIshi
    April 29th, 2009 at 7:11 pm

    I’ll be starting medical school this July and am hoping the “gunner”-ness of my 175 fellow classmates is kept to a minimum. Competition is good, but balance is better.

  21. suzjazz
    May 27th, 2009 at 2:27 pm

    I couldn’t help laughing at the three colors of ink and the highlighter. I did not go to med school, but I recognize the gunner in a lot of my college classes. The thing that amazes me is the arrogance. Where I went to college, no one would ever presume to criticize the professor’s teaching methods.
    I hope Becky isn’t practicing medicine now, but I fear that she is.

Leave a Reply

« Monday’s Guilty Pleasure: The House of God Believable? »