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What I meant by a “normal summer class” is precisely what you went on to mention, the standard month-long summer courses offered by universities. When I first read that the HuMed students took those courses over the summer, I figured it’d just be undergrad summer classes, so I didn’t see how they were ‘skipping’ anything.</p>
<p>But if they do just as well as the regularly admitted students even after taking basic versions of these courses, that undermines the reasoning I’ve sometimes heard, that physics and organic are needed to provide students with a very small sample of the workload in medical school. ‘You can’t handle med school if you can’t handle organic.’ Of course, you could argue that the students admitted in this program have demonstrated high academic ability already anyway, and your average college student needs to see if they can handle the rigors of hard science classes on a small scale before jumping into the big leagues.</p>