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<p>But why is all that extra work necessary if your bad grades are simply because you took difficult classes, especially when somebody who took easier classes may have gotten admitted over you? That’s the source of the inefficiency. Basically, it means that those people who took difficult classes are being punished. Why? Wouldn’t it be better to simply judge people with a fair measuring stick in the first place? Why do people who take difficult classes have to do extra work? </p>
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<p>Is it? Is it really totally subjective? The whole point of the admissions process is to be admit people who are supposed to become the best doctors. That is why what matters is your performance on ostensibly medicine-related subjects such as biology and OChem (although that connection is tenuous as has been pointed out). If the process really is totally subjective, then why not simply admit med-students based on, say, athletic ability? </p>
<p>The salient point is that if there is a more reliable way to measure who is going to be a better doctor, then we should look at that. The counterargument that has been proposed by some seems to be nothing more than simple inertia: that this is the way things have been done traditionally and we don’t care if there may be a better way. I suspect it’s also a matter of ‘chronological justice’: that since they had to suffer the pain of learning irrelevant, time-wasting topics, they now want others to suffer the same pain, and whether the end-result actually produces the best doctors is unimportant. While I understand that stance, I also find it sad because it means that we will never have progress. </p>
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<p>And, like I said, the present system rewards people who are “strategic” in the way they choose their classes. </p>
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<p>Maybe that’s even better. The point is, we can clearly see that the present system is flawed because different schools and different profs have different grading schemes. Is a ‘C’ from MIT equal to an ‘A’ from Northwest Mississippi Community College? Who knows?</p>
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<p>What we are talking about is not regarding topics that you may actually need to know at some point, but about topics that you never need to know, like Diels-Alder, and are used solely as a manner of weeding people out. My point is simple: if you are going to weed people out, fine, but weed them out by testing on relevant information. </p>
<p>If the only point is to simply weed people out, then why not just admit people who can run a 3-hour marathon? Or who can bench press twice their body weight? You would weed out plenty of people by doing that. By doing that, we would certainly have the world’s most fit doctors. Whether they would actually provide the best medical care is an entirely different story. </p>
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<p>That happens already. Rich, well-connected kids are more likely to be able to get admitted to grade-inflated, hand-holding schools like the Ivies. {For example, George Bush and Al Gore were mediocre high school students, yet they still got admitted to Yale and Harvard respectively). At those schools, it is practically impossible to get a truly bad grade. Heck, Ted Kennedy was caught cheating twice at Harvard but was still allowed to not only graduate but ended up with grades decent enough to get into a top law school (Virginia). Other schools, notably many state schools (i.e. Berkeley), have absolutely no compunction about flunking you out. I know many people who flunked out of Berkeley who I suspect probably would have graduated if they had gone to an Ivy. {Granted, maybe they probably wouldn’t have gotten top grades, but at least they would have graduated, whereas they ended up flunking out of Berkeley entirely.} </p>
<p>You say that rich kids can afford prep courses for the MCAT, but similarly, rich kids can afford private tutoring sessions to maximize their grades. I remember back in undergrad how some rich kids were able to afford to pay for private prep sessions to help them maximize their performance in the class. Those sessions were taught by former students of the class who had gotten A’s, or sometimes by former GSI’s of the class. The other students, like myself, who didn’t have that kind of money, weren’t allowed into those sessions. Heck, I remember one guy who would visit the rooms after those private sessions had been concluded to see if they had left any information on the chalkboards and to rummage through the trash to look for any tutoring materials that had been thrown away. He couldn’t afford the tutoring sessions, but he was just trying to scrape up something that he could learn from. </p>
<p>Then of course there is the key advantage that rich kids can shift their time schedules around to take classes with the easier professors. Other students who are not rich often times have to work and hence may have to take the class with the difficult prof because it’s the only class that fits their available schedule.</p>
<p>The point is, whether you’re talking about the MCAT or grades, rich students will always have an advantage. It’s a wash. But, if nothing else, at least you can purge the system of the variance associated with different grading standards by not relying grades so much. That would eliminate most ex-post inefficiency (in that some students get rejected just because they took difficult classes), and ex-ante inefficiency (in that people are incentivized to strategize their way through college by hunting for the easiest classes.)</p>