<p>Saw this on CNN tonight. Parents of future radiologists and other MDs, what are your thoughts? Cheating or not?</p>
<p>[Exclusive:</a> Doctors cheated on exams - CNN.com](<a href=“http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/13/health/prescription-for-cheating/index.html?npt=NP1]Exclusive:”>http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/13/health/prescription-for-cheating/index.html?npt=NP1)</p>
<p>Of course it’s cheating. This is not a gray area. Radiologists signed a sworn oath not to reveal old test questions, then wrote them down verbatim right after the test. Students used those questions (which are repeated in future exams) to “study” for the exams. </p>
<p>Doctors who have been found to either share answers or use shared answers should be required to pay a fine and retake tests made up with entirely new questions. Do these people have no morals at all?</p>
<p>Yes it is. Why is this a question?</p>
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<p>The American Board of Radiology needs to write better exams.</p>
<p>“Yes it is. Why is this a question?”</p>
<p>Some medical school officials interviewed by CNN skirted the question, and some hinted that the exams were impossible to pass without the “system”. This makes you very confident about your next CT or MRI scan results, doesn’t it?</p>
<p>^Good point.</p>
<p>It is cheating if you sign a document agreeing not to do something and then do what you swore not to do. That’s clear cut. The question is what to do about it. If the test is so flawed, the board should change the test, especially if everyone knows you have to use the recalls to pass the test.</p>
<p>Of course it’s cheating. The College Board goes to great lengths to insure shenanigans of this sort don’t occur. It’s cheating when one steals a semester exam from school computers and distributes them along with the answers, too. Why is this even up for debate?</p>
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<p>If that’s actually true, they need to write a more realistic exam, one a reasonably studious test taker can be prepared to take with honesty and integrity.</p>
<p>“This makes you very confident about your next CT or MRI scan results, doesn’t it?”</p>
<p>More concerned about mammograms than CT or MRI results. My understanding is that radiology has been outsourced for years (reports easily sent back and forth by computer), and I always check the credentials of the radiologist reading any tests in my family. You can request they be reread by a different person.</p>
<p>There was something in the report about this occurring at an army hospital, I think. There is another thread on CC discussing the quality of education of surgeons at military facilities. After reading that I checked the credentials of one of my docs who had been educated at a military facility, and discovered he had failed his follow up qualifying exam,
but apparently was able to continue practicing - he wasn’t a surgeon or radiologist, but a specialist.</p>
<p>^^^
You don’t have to be board certified to practice medicine. Doctors have to be licensed. They have to complete a residency and, in subspecialties, a fellowship. After that, they can practice. That goes for physicians of any sort, whether they practice a medical or surgical specialty. Board certification is the gold standard, however, and many hospitals do specify that their physicians complete certification in order to work there. If you want to know whether a physician is certified, visit the website for the American Board of Medical Specialties. The site includes information on official specialties and subspecialties, as well as a search tool to see whether and in what a physician is certified.</p>
<p>A few other points on physician training:</p>
<ul>
<li>Licensing exams are at the state level.</li>
<li>Hospitals have rigorous credentialing and privileging processes to ensure the qualifications of their medical workforce (i.e., not just anyone can perform angioplasty, say, or a liver transplant). </li>
<li>Some physicians do fellowship training in programs that do not correspond to an “official” subspecialty (so in the radiology example, there are physicians who are fellowship-trained in breast imaging).</li>
</ul>
<p>I agree that it’s cheating. Hope the new exams eliminate this.</p>
<p>poetsheart, were you TIC about that CB comment? I hope so.</p>
<p>See I can understand why people cheat on the SAT or ACT, but if you cheat on this exam and you don’t learn certain things, important things that could one day mean life or death for a patient. To whomever cheated on the exam, “Have fun with the malpractice lawsuits”. ;)</p>
<p>“There was something in the report about this occurring at an army hospital, I think. There is another thread on CC discussing the quality of education of surgeons at military facilities”</p>
<p>The person who approached CNN was a military doctor, so his experience was within the army hospital. However, CNN learned that similar practices are quite widespread; Harvard’s med. School teaching hospital was mentioned among some others. Some say that if one does not participate in generation of recalls after the exams, s/he will be ostracized by the fellow students.</p>
<p>I do not know what is more disturbing: the cheating or the fact that exams that are supposed to test our newlyminted doctors’ skills and knowledge are so poorly designed that they fail to serve their intended purpose (some interviewed said that exam questions were so obscure that they hardly related to any real situations).</p>
<p>@AvidStudent,</p>
<p>Cheating, in my estimation, is wrong, no matter what. I truly don’t “understand” it, regardless of the consequences. As to the consequences of the radiology exam cheating, which I’ll stipulate as egregious, they may not be as dire as your post suggests. First of all, who’s to say these docs aren’t learning by studying the contraband material? They probably are learning. Not the way the test-makers intended them to, but they’re still covering the material. Also, as I mentioned in my post above, doctors are credentialed and privileged through a rigorous process. Hospitals also have (both because they care about patients and because they have to) quality assurance programs. They also “voluntarily” (it’s not so voluntary) submit to review by external accrediting and certifying agencies, and are subject to scheduled and drop-in reviews by state agencies. Do people who are not qualified slip through the cracks, even with all these safeguards? Likely. Does the cheating on this exam translate into a crisis in medical imaging? I would be surprised. (I’ll reserve judgment on that, in the event someone comes forward with data that prove I’m mistaken.)</p>
<p>Mentioned in the sidebar is the fact that the oral exam will be eliminated in 2013. I think this is a mistake. It would be very difficult to cheat on an oral exam.</p>
<p>^Maybe you could if you were, like, a witch or supernatural and you could channel someone else. Sounds like a scenario from Bewitched or, for a more contemporary example, Charmed. But even on a TV show, they’d make it clear that CHEATING IS WRONG.</p>
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The problem is they’re ONLY learning what they know will be on the test, while in normal circumstances they would feel compelled to master the entire curriculum. Still, it’s inexcusable that new tests aren’t continually devised.</p>
<p>^But they’re not only learning what they know will be on the test. They’re learning that and then they’re learning, through interactions with their peers and on-the-job training, how to be good radiologists. Learning how to be a doctor is not so drastically different from learning how to do any job, though the stakes are admittedly higher than with many, if not most, other professions. Some doctors may have better mentors than others but residency and fellowship training IS education. I agree; it sounds as if the test is flawed. And if cheating on it is the norm, that’s an issue. But I’ve not yet seen any evidence that testing deficits have led to a general deterioration in the quality of radiological practice. </p>
<p>You’d think I was a doctor, as opinionated as I am. Actually, I’ve worked at a medical center for the last couple of decades and have interacted with a lot of physicians in my time.</p>
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<p>They may have led to the deterioration of ethical standards, though. I find it upsetting that evidently a substantial portion of the profession condones blatant cheating. What else do they condone? What other standards are they ignoring?</p>