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<p>Norcalguy, I tend to agree more with you. I suspect there are indeed quite a few BS/MD students who couldn’t get into med school any other way.</p>
<p>Where we disagree is that you seem to think that that’s a bad thing. I am rather neutral. I would say that if you’re so concerned about that, then you should be equally concerned about all the ways that less statistically qualified people are getting into med school. For example, affirmative action. Or the Caribbean schools. Or the OD schools (as OD’s are fully licensed to practice medicine). I don’t know why you’d want to single out the BS/MD programs.</p>
<p>It also leads to the issue of grade inflation. You say that getting a 3.5 GPA is reasonable to expect. Yet I think we can all agree that some schools grade harder than others, and some disciplines grade harder than others. It’s much harder to get a 3.5 as an engineer at MIT than in, say, Leisure Studies at some creampuff school. But med school adcoms sadly don’t seem to care very much about that. {Which leads to numerous perverse incentives that I have pointed out in other threads - i.e. that it is better not to take a class at all than to take it and get a poor grade.} </p>
<p>But the bottom line is this. If the problem is systematic, then you should take it up with the organization in charge of running the system. Perhaps we should ask the AAMC why they’re willing to sanction BS/MD programs, if they are in fact loopholes. Maybe the board exams need to be tightened up. Maybe the residency matching process needs to be tightened up to do a better job of selecting only those MD grads who are well prepared. </p>
<p>But if a loophole in the system exists, it’s hard to fault individual people for exploiting it. It’s not their fault the loophole exists. You should blame the people who created the loophole.</p>