<p>Is that the core of your complaint? That you just don’t like the beginning of the article’s tone? You have no quarrel with the actual issues that the article raises, you just don’t like its tone?</p>
<p>Keep in mind that the beginning of the article is not just the ruminations of any old premed. It’s about somebody who successfully made it into and then graduated from med-school and hence is now an MD. Hence, I would argue that she actually has significant credibility to say what is and what is not relevant to know. And certainly I think we can agree that the other people who are quoted, such as the Deans of the Yale School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School have tremendous credibility. </p>
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<p>Nobody is arguing that you shouldn’t teach OChem at all. What they are proposing is that they teach only the relevant parts of OChem, perhaps along with an interesting idea of integrating OChem with Biochem, as Harvard is apparently doing. There are plenty of topics in OChem that physicians just don’t need to know. Physicians are not chemical engineers. </p>
<p>Again, to quote from the article:</p>
<p>“In my many years of medicine, I have never heard the Diels-Alder reaction mentioned once,” says Robert Alpern, dean of the Yale School of Medicine.</p>
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<p>Then I would argue that that just reinforces my point further: if it accounts for so little of the MCAT anyway, then that’s all the more reason for de-emphasizing it in favor of something more relevant. </p>
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<p>Easy. Biochem. Molecular/cellular biology. Anatomy. Physiology. Any or all of these topics would be more relevant than merely OChem per se. </p>
<p>Now, to be sure, nobody is disputing that you should know some OChem in order to understand those other topics. But the point is, you don’t need to know all of OChem. You just need to know the sections that are relevant to help you understand those higher topics. </p>
<p>Put another way, if somebody can prove that he knows biochemistry or molecular biology at a high level, perhaps through some standardized test, or perhaps by getting a top grade in a biochem course, then, honestly, what does it matter what his OChem grade was? His biochem acumen proved that he knows what is relevant, and ultimately, isn’t that what’s really important?</p>
<p>The problem is that med school is already jammed packed. Even spending an extra 5 weeks to teach orgo would put a heavy burden on M1’s. </p>
<p>In college, this is less of an issue. The typical college major requires only 40-60 credits to complete, while you need 120 credits to graduate, leaving ample room to fit in orgo. Hence, it’s easier for an undergrad to spend (or perhaps waste) 2 semesters on orgo than for a M1 to spend five weeks on orgo. </p>
<p>You can integrate orgo with biochem. However, that would essentially stretch biochem into a 2-semester course (and biochem at my alma mater is already a two semester course) so you’d still only save one semester. </p>
<p>The courses you suggested are fine and relevant, but do not approach the amount of memorization you have to do for orgo, which itself does not approach the amount of memorization you have to do for med school. You still need a way to weed out the fluff. Even under our current system, too many premeds are slipping through. I find it more humane to weed someone out in their freshman or sophomore years than after they’ve spent thousands of dollars and an entire year applying to med school. </p>
<p>And, yes, I agree that cell bio, genetics, and biochem should be required as well. But, I’d rather waste 2 semesters of an undergrad’s time than 5 weeks of a M1’s time with orgo.</p>
<p>And you might have trouble getting med schools to substitute anatomy for orgo. Some med schools (like UCLA SOM) expressly discourage premeds from taking anatomy and physiology in college. Med schools want to teach core subjects like anatomy their way and find anatomy taught in college to be taught incorrectly or inefficiently. Since we use orgo so little in medicine, it’s an acceptable tool for the med school to use to measure the memorization ability of a student without interfering with the M1 curriculum later on.</p>
<p>A lot of what Norcalguy is saying makes sense from my perspective as an MII. Most of the stuff you have to take as a pre-med applies very little, if at all, to the classroom years of medical school, let alone what’s probably in store for me in the clinical years. The point, as far as I can gather, was to be hard enough that people would quit and to weed out people who didn’t stand a reasonable chance early enough that they could still go to a plan B. If someone does well in most of their coursework, but has a hiccup in orgo or physics, then admissions committees usually take that into consideration.</p>
<p>I took anatomy in college, and it helped little to none with med school anatomy- the emphasis was totally different and in retrospect, I wasted that chunk of time in college. College courses, in general, are taught by PhD s, and so the focus is not going to be on what a clinician might find useful. </p>
<p>In the past, the doctor with the most information stored in his head was the best doctor. Now, it’s the doctor that can best use the clues he’s gathered from the patient and combine it with the new resources available- databases of genetic research and the latest journals online, and other readily accessible sources of facts, have made rote memorization less important. Not unimportant, but if you can’t remember the 4th enzyme in the Krebs cycle, you just need a computer. You’d still have to know what a defect in glucose metabolism would look like in a patient, but specifics, like the structures of the molecules involved, don’t need to be taking up space in a doctor’s brain.</p>
<p>To throw another wrench into the works, if pre-med coursework is supposed to be relevant for med school, why even bother with pre-med at all? Why not just take some kind of standardized test at the end of secondary school and enter med school at 18? That’s how Europe does it, as far as I know. With the four-year time savings, they could include all relevant material in the medical school curriculum and not rely on knowledge from outside sources. The way the American system works adds time and inefficiency to the process, but it also allows people from many different backgrounds to converge into the “doctorization” furnace, and at any point in their life. I was going to be a high-school science teacher until the end of junior year. And, as they drum into my head on a daily basis, diversity is good.</p>
<p>Pharmagal: It would be great in general if Americans had the same kind of mentality as our counterparts overseas. However, I don’t see this happening in the near future. Not until circumstances (quality of life is much more favorable for people that don’t kill themselves studying over here) force it upon the population as a whole. </p>
<p>Complaining isn’t that bad. It’s a way to blow off steam in a relatively harmless way. I think it’s fair, considering that we are putting in a lot of hours doing stuff that the vast majority of the population can’t. It’s our method of catharsis. That said, I don’t complain as much as most, because to my way of thinking, all of this suffering is self-inflicted.</p>
<p>Again, nobody is proposing that med students come in with no Ochem knowledge at all. What is being proposed is that they come in with the relevant knowledge of OChem. In other words, change the premed sequence so that what is taught is actually relevant. </p>
<p>Now, speaking to your point, even if some med students do get admitted without any OChem background, I don’t necessarily see why it’s the responsibility of the med schools to teach it to them. Why not leave that responsibility to the students?</p>
<p>I’ll give you an example. Let’s take the PhD programs in business/economics at schools like Harvard and MIT. Most students who are admitted to these programs will have advanced math backgrounds, including Analysis, and Calculus of Variations. But not all of the admittees will have such a background. Heck, I know of several people who didn’t. The programs will then strongly recommend that those students get that necessary background, i.e. via self-study during the summer before the program starts. But the programs aren’t going to teach it to you. They’re just going to start the first year of required coursework presuming that you do have the background, and if you don’t, hey, that’s your problem. And yes, some of those students ended up doing extremely poorly, including some of them even failing the first-year required graduate economics course sequence. {But here’s the irony: many of them became successful anyway. For example, there is one guy, who shall remain nameless, who is now one of the most famous professors at Harvard Business School despite having failed economics back when he was a Harvard grad student. Another is a rising academic star at the Harvard School of Public Health, despite having failed economics when she was a Harvard grad student.} </p>
<p>But the point simply is that the med-schools can simply lay more responsibility unto the students themselves. It’s not the job of the med schools to teach the students everything. Heck, it’s not the job of any program to always teach you everything. Sometimes you may have to learn through self-study. </p>
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<p>Again, the issue is not so much about the time but rather about the relevance. Or, in other words, the efficiency. If you are going to force premeds to take 2 semesters of OChem, why not force them to take 2 semesters of relevant OChem? For example, why waste time teaching them Diels-Alder, when, as Dean Alpern has said, he has never seen it mentioned even once in all his years in medicine? Why not instead use that time to teach them OChem or biochem topics that those premeds will actually need to know? </p>
<p>Consider the description of Harvard’s Chemistry 27, which is the ‘melded’ version of the 2nd semester of OChem with BioChem. This seems to be a far more relevant class than the standard version of OChem taught to premeds at other schools. I am fairly sure this is the revised Harvard course that the WSJ article is referring to. </p>
<p>*
Chemical principles that govern the processes driving living systems are illustrated with examples drawn from biochemistry, cell biology, and medicine. The course deals with organic chemical reactivity (reaction mechanisms, structure-reactivity relationships), with matters specifically relevant to the life sciences (chemistry of proteins, nucleic acids, drugs, natural products, cofactors, signal transduction), and with applications of chemical biology to medicine and biotechnology. An understanding of organic reactions and their “arrow” pushing mechanisms is required.*</p>
<p>From what I’ve seen, Harvard Chemistry 27 ain’t no joke. For example, I’ve found blogs that have said “Chemistry 27 actually makes me cry”. Yet at the end of the day, Harvard boasts one of the highest premed placement rates in the country. So clearly, something is working. </p>
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<p>Hey, what can I say? Some schools will need to change. Just like the MCAT has changed several times in its history, and I’m sure some schools must have resisted those changes. </p>
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<p>Now you’re conceding the sad truth of the matter: that OChem, as it stands now, is really just a ‘game’. It’s just a tool that med schools use to weed people out.</p>
<p>The problem of course is that it isn’t even a tool used by the med schools, but rather a tool used by the premed programs. You said it yourself - there aren’t that many OChem questions on the MCAT. Nor are those OChem MCAT questions specifically broken out under a separate subheading. So even if you bomb all of those questions, your Biological Sciences MCAT score will decline only slightly, and med-schools have no way of really knowing that you did poorly in the OChem questions specfically. Hence, med schools don’t really “know” anything about your OChem memorization ability per se. </p>
<p>The only thing they can really see to ascertain your OChem memorization ability is your OChem grade. But that’s where the problem is: for as we all know, different schools use different grading schemes, and heck, even the same school may use different grading schemes, especially if different professors are teaching the same course. Is a B in OChem from Harvard equal to an A from Arkansas State University? Who knows? </p>
<p>All of this merely breeds cynicism in the system. Premeds know full well that they’re just playing a game. They don’t need to really know OChem. They just need to get a good grade in OChem. So if that means taking it with the “easy” professor, they’ll do that. If that means taking it at a community college, they’ll do that. {Like I’ve always said, it’s sadly true that, in the premed process, it’s better not to take a difficult class at all than to take it and get a bad grade.} </p>
<p>Look, if med-schools really thought that memorization abilities were so important, and that OChem was such a great way to measure those abilities, then they should make OChem a very large chunk of the MCAT. Heck, it should have its own section (not just folded into Bio). They certainly shouldn’t be ‘outsourcing’ such a crucial measuring stick to the undergrad programs, and relying so much on undergrad grades, when I think we can all agree that those undergrad grades are noisy signals.</p>
<p>I agree that this is the situation we have at hand, but unlike y’all, I actually think it’s a problem, because all it does is breed cynicism in the process. A lot of premeds realize quickly that they don’t really need to know a lot of this stuff; that this is all just a game. An artificial game with artificial barriers whose only real purpose is to ‘weed out’ those who are deemed unworthy, but whose barriers do not provide much intrinsic worth as far as actually being a doctor. Hence, you end up with students who take the ‘binge and purge’ mentality: they memorize a huge list of facts for the test, and then afterwards, they immediately forget it all because they know they don’t need to remember it. </p>
<p>However, I suspect, as the WSJ article pointed out, that there probably is a better way. I believe you can have a process that serves to both weed out the unworthy and still teach relevant information. Or, in other words, if you’re going to weed people out, then you should weed them out based on topics that they actually do need to know in order to be good physicians. Otherwise, you end up weeding people out for not knowing what they don’t actually need to know, and that is clearly inefficient. You would be able to stop the binge-and-purge mentality. </p>
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<p>Frankly, I think the European process is better. After all, I am aware of no evidence that would indicate that European doctors are in any way less capable than are American doctors. Heck, European health care systems seem to earn far higher overall ratings than does the US system (although that is obviously a product of multiple factors such as universal health insurance, etc.). I have heard the argument that US doctors, because of their undergraduate education, are able to relate to their patients better. But is there really any evidence to indicate that US doctors relate to their patients better than do European doctors? </p>
<p>What you could have is a dual system, combining both the European and US style, where some students are brought into med-school straight from high school, and others are brought in after college. Heck, the US already does this, at least in terms of admissions, via the BS/MD combined programs that provide guaranteed admission to med school right out of high school. The problem is that those students still have to spend time getting their BS before they can proceed to their MD.</p>
<p>i think we’re wasting students time by having them complete a BS and then applying to medical school. i think most professional degree programs should admit students out of high school. the maturity argument that med schools make is nonsense.</p>
I think this is the most important point (made by Son of Opie), and it is the biggest problem I have with European systems. This is the very beauty of the American system, and I would not want to trade it for a system where students are shuttled into career paths right out of high school.</p>
<p>I’ve heard this argument many times before, and I do grant it a certain legitimacy. I have heard students complain, “Why do I need to know this to be a doctor? When will I ever use this?” In my opinion, medicine is completely intertwined with science. In order to practice medicine effectively, you must have an understanding of science, and the scientific method.</p>
<p>Granted, my view doesn’t answer the argument that other science classes can be substituted for Orgo. But I believe that both a broad base of knowledge and a very strong understanding of scientific basis of understanding the natural world are crucial. The former can be taught with classes like physiology, and the latter can be taught in classes like physics and Orgo.</p>
<p>People like to become doctors to help people, which is a very noble ideal. However, other professions also allow you to help people. Why not go into public health or join a non profit organization? Medicine is special in that you get to help people, AND use the scientific method to solve your problems. Science and medicine are inextricably intertwined; medicine has no foundation without science, and science has much less practicality without medicine.</p>
<p>It would be difficult to get clinically relevant material presented in college courses, mainly because college courses are not taught by M.D.s. To some extent, this is a problem even in medical school, because what is emphasized by an actual practitioner who comes in to teach lecture on the side is different than what a PhD would present on the same topic.</p>
<p>Even in med school, we still complain, “why do we have to learn this?” And the best answer I can come up with so far (other than the pragmatic reason, to do well on tests and on boards) is: we don’t know what we’ll need to know at this point, because we don’t know our final destination. Most med students don’t know what their specialty will be until the third or fourth year. Most of what we learn in college or med school will eventually be discarded, unless it’s directly relevant to what we do. So if you become a hand surgeon, you’ve “wasted” all of that time studying other parts of the body. No way around it, from what I can see, other than trying to force people to specialize earlier, i.e. straight to medical school rather than college, choosing a specialty right away. I don’t think I approve of that method.</p>
<p>I appreciate that I went to college and got to study a variety of topics, rather than enter straight into what is in some senses the world’s most complicated trade school. My music and history minors have no inherent usefulness for my long-term career choice, but I am glad I have them.</p>
<p>And again: The best doctors now are the ones that can use the resources available to find the answers to clinical questions, not the ones who hold the most information in their heads.</p>
<p>Ha! But it’s OK for engineering students, right? After all, I would argue that engineering is a professional degree with a well-defined career path. Many schools (i.e. Berkeley, Cornell) have you apply directly to the engineering program straight out of high school, with only limited options to switch into engineering afterwards. </p>
<p>Or how about nursing? I would argue that that’s also a well-defined career path. If you want to get a BSN from, say, the UPenn School of Nursing, you apply straight out of high school. </p>
<p>Hence, if you can do so for other career paths, why can’t you do the same for medicine?</p>
<p>Not sure which courses in med school make you question “why do we have learn this?”.</p>
<p>As I see it, most of the fields overlap extensively. So, everything you learn now, will provide you a comprehensive background of how the body works normally and what goes aberrant under distress or disorders. Therefore utimately, it leads you to a better diagnosis and pharmacological or alternate treatments.</p>
<p>I see all med science areas as being overlapping and interconnecting extensively.</p>
<p>One can not learn metabolic disorders for example, without its cardiovascular effects, or cardiovascular disorders without its cerebrovascular effects, nor any cerebrovascular disorders without their cognitive and psychiatric effects.
Or study GI without sympathetic/parasympathetic/serotonergic causes…</p>
<p>I think the beauty of medical science is that there IS so much interconnectivity! </p>
<p>I agree that resources are absolutely key to finding answers to clinical questions but without a sound foundation of all the courses you are taking in medical school, one may not be able to connect all the dots/pieces of information together or make sense out of it.</p>
<p>Obviously, some people are always going to be forced to learn some things that they won’t actually need to know. Nobody is proposing that we will ever reach a system of perfect 100% efficiency for everybody. </p>
<p>But just because we will never reach perfection is not an excuse to just add in extra material for which we can safely say that nobody in the medical profession really needs to know. Again, from the article: * ““In my many years of medicine, I have never heard the Diels-Alder reaction mentioned once,” says Robert Alpern, dean of the Yale School of Medicine.” * So why do we force premeds to learn it? </p>
<p>If all we were looking for was a pure test of one’s memorization abilities, and nothing else, then here’s a simple proposal: why not force all premeds to learn Chinese? Now that’s a skill that takes some serious memorization ability. You think OChem is tough, just try learning the thousands of characters just to attain the basic literacy required to read a Chinese newspaper. {And for those who already speak Chinese, then you can get them to learn some other language; attaining fluency in any language clearly requires a strong ability to memorize. In other words, you could require every premed to demonstrate fluency in multiple languages as a test of their ‘memorization’ skills. I doubt that anybody here would seriously argue that learning another language is not a strong demonstration of one’s memorization capabilities.} </p>
<p>But of course I expect some of you would object that we shouldn’t want to be imparting just any type of memorization, but should have to do with memorizing topics that actually have to do with the practice of medicine. But that’s also my point. If we know that Diels-Alder has nothing to do with medicine, then why force premeds to learn it? </p>
<p>I think part of the problem is something that others here have alluded to: that premed courses are not taught by MD’s, but rather, are taught by people with PhD’s. But that just leads to the question of why exactly can’t we have premed courses that are taught by MD’s? After all, most medical schools are part of a larger university. So why can’t some of the premed courses in the undergrad college be taught by some of the faculty from the med-school, in some sort of cross-reg arrangement? Note, I’m not asking for all of them to be taught that way. But why not some? If inter-departmental funding is the problem (in that the med-school will now need to fund some of the undergrad teaching), then surely the university can devise some sort of transfer payment system where some money from the undergrad program is diverted to the med-school for every premed who takes a class under a med-school prof, in the same way that cross-reg funding happens now. {For example, when a Harvard student cross-reg’s at MIT, Harvard pays a fee to MIT, and vice versa.} </p>
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<p>As I’ve argued before, it seems to me that the best system would be a dual-track system. Those who want to enter med-school straight from high school will have the means to do so. Those who want to go to college first can do that. </p>
<p>Granted, because they will be competing against college grads, maybe those applying straight out of high school will only be able to get into lower-ranked med-schools. But at least they have that opportunity. Right now, as it stands, you have lots of premed college students who, frankly, don’t care about college at all and just see it as an obstacle to getting to what they really want, which is to go to med-school.</p>
<p>I respect your opinion on this, and I suppose that Orgo is a bit irrelevant for primary care.</p>
<p>However, many medical schools are known for research and MP/PhD programs. I think organic chemistry should be pretty much required for research- it teaches the fundamentals of bonding and reactions. All the grad students in my lab have taken Orgo during undergrad, and I even work in a molecular biology lab.</p>
<p>I think the anecdote should be taken into consideration, but with a grain of salt. How many times have you heard from adults that they have never used math in their careers? They might never be asked to prove the Pythagorean Theorem, but the foundations, systematic ways of thinking, and basic principles carry on. Same thing with Orgo; although you may not touch upon the specifics, you will gain a further appreciation of reactions, further expand your deductive reasoning skills, and perfect your understanding of the scientific method. You can wait until medical school to learn all the knowledge based content, undergrad is a great time to work on your fundamentals and give yourself a strong scientific background.</p>
<p>Let me use another example. In high school, everyone is strongly encouraged to take language arts classes, even if they don’t plan on studying English. One might argue that language arts teaches the fundamentals of communication that is necessary for success in any profession. Although this is true, why not make them take an easier speech/communication class? Why should people planning on studying mathematics, engineering, or physics be required to read Dickens and Thoreau? The reasoning here is that if you plan on pursuing a degree of higher education, you must have a strong fundamental background in critical reading, something a basic speech class cannot teach. </p>
<p>I don’t think Orgo is a test of memorization at all. It relies on deductive reasoning, using basic axioms and applying it in multiple situations. My professor told us that is we are relying too much on memorization, then we are doing it wrong. I think that medical schools could care less if you can memorize things during undergrad; they will teach you everything you need to know in medical school. They want to make sure you are a good thinker.</p>
<p>I think your MD interaction is a good idea. In fact, my school has courses taught by MDs. My medical anthropology class was taught by an MD/PhD. One of my pre-med advisors is also a practicing physician. My academic advisor’s husband is a dean at the medical school. My intro bio class was taught by a professor from the medical school. I think this may be school dependent, other schools may have less interaction and in fact may house a little hostility.</p>
Wanting to know the minimum is a dangerous philosophy. Medicine is a constantly evolving body of knowledge that requires constant learning, mastery and retention of new material. </p>
<p>For example, consider going to medical school in 1974 and wondering why so much time was spent on immunology – kids get shots, polio is dead, what’s the big deal? Flash forward to 1989: the most common admitting diagnosis on a medicine service is AIDS. Who’d a thunk?</p>
<p>What about hand surgeons? Guess what? Hands are attached to patients who have systemic disease. Can’t read an EKG, then you’ll have to guess why the anesthesiologist canceled your case.</p>
<p>How about pharmacology? Without a working knowledge of organic chemistry, pharmacology becomes a morass of facts to memorize. Practicing physicians who forget their medical school pharmacology are doomed to rely on drug reps for information (guess who gets sued?)</p>
<p>The have a simple and practical objection to this, and is one that I have stated previously: med-schools adcoms don’t actually test to see whether you actually know OChem. Not exactly. As norcalguy stated, OChem comprises a bare 5% of all questions on the MCAT. Hence, med-school adcoms have very little ability to actually know how much OChem you actually understand.</p>
<p>What med-school adcoms can actually see are your OChem grades. But, like I said, the problem with that is simple: different schools, and even different profs within the same school, use different grading standards. An A from one prof is not the same as an A (or even a B) from another prof. Statisticians would therefore say that your OChem grades have very low ‘resolution’. </p>
<p>If med-school adcoms were really thought OChem knowledge was so important, then they should test for that knowledge. Not just rely on what the undergrad programs tell them. If a guy got an ‘A’ in OChem from his undergrad program, is that because he really knows it, or just because he happened to find an easy prof with an easy curve? </p>
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<p>See above. Again, if med-school adcoms really want to ensure that their admittees really know this material, then they should test for it accordingly. </p>
<p>Otherwise, it just reinforces the notion that the premed process is nothing more than a game, in which you don’t actually really need to know what’s going on; all you really need is to get * good grades*.</p>
<p>Medical schools spend time teaching elementary science…
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<p>… because undergraduate preparation is often inadequate.
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<p>Teaching undergraduate science will require courses focused on “pre-med” science…
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<p>… in institutions not intended to be pre-professional mills.
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<p>So IF new, touchy feely science courses come into existence…
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<p>… medical schools admissions committees will have to rely on more rigorous and focused MCAT testing.
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<p>So, yes, medical schools, through the proxy MCAT mechanism, should and will test for understanding of relevant organic chemistry, rather than merely requiring a year of orgo.</p>
<p>I agree with you on the point that medical schools sometimes emphasize grades too much. But the more I think of it, everything is kind of giddy. I know some friends who take easy classes that are listed as advanced courses, and find other ways of “gaming” the system for good grades. There also people who win elections in clubs and do absolutely nothing. There are always people who will manipulate the system- we can’t do anything about that.</p>
<p>People will always be able to game the system, slip through cracks, et cetera. However, that is why medical schools like to see standard pre-med curriculums, such as Orgo and the MCATs which are both hard courses that require adequate preparation and are almost impossible to game. If you try something like take Orgo during the summer, med schools will question it.</p>
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<p>The problem with orgo is that a lot of the problems are visual and you need model kits in order to solve problems correctly. I don’t see the possibility of allowing models on the test. However, I admit I am only a sophomore and do not know much about the MCATs yet, but my logical guess is that organic chemistry questions would be difficult to represent in exam form.</p>
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<p>I completely agree with you here. However, I do not see how this only applies to Ochem. There is too much variation between schools, majors, classes, and teachers to make conclusive comments about difficulty- and medical schools know this. Like I said, people will always try to game the system. Hence, medical schools hire statisticians to see within each class how you stand. Also, if your school has committee letters, they can make it clear if a certain professor is hard and whatnot.</p>
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<p>Like my .02 cents pointed out, a lot of medical schools know that undergrad educations are insufficient for medicine- liberal arts educations in science just aren’t specialized enough for medicine. They don’t care about how your undergrad knowledge can help you in medical school, they want to make sure that you were able to adapt to your environment, that you learned the fundamental skills needed in medicine and/or any scientific career, that you were able to take science courses with labs, research, ECs and clinical experience. That, to me, is the premed experience.</p>
<p>I’m not the expert on this because I am only an undergrad. Maybe I’ll regret taking Orgo once (if) I become a doctor. But if medical schools were using Orgo only to “weed out” students, I could see much harder classes they they could have chosen. Why not make advanced biochemistry, physical chemistry, or statistical thermodynamics mandatory instead? These are equally less relevant when it comes to medicine, and (at my school at least) are much harder than Orgo. </p>
<p>However, despite all this, Orgo is only one class and I know plenty of people who got C’s in Orgo and still got into great medical schools. One kid at my school spent too much time in his lab, which traded off with his Orgo grades. However, he was able to expatiate this fact his personal statement, which still showed his intellectual passion. He is now a practicing doctor.</p>
<p>Quote:
“What med-school adcoms can actually see are your OChem grades. But, like I said, the problem with that is simple: different schools, and even different profs within the same school, use different grading standards. An A from one prof is not the same as an A (or even a B) from another prof. Statisticians would therefore say that your OChem grades have very low ‘resolution’.”</p>
<p>That’s why Med schools also require MCATs. MCATs are one standardized way for them to gauge your knowledge.</p>
<p>Quote " Why not make advanced biochemistry, physical chemistry, or statistical thermodynamics mandatory instead? These are equally less relevant when it comes to medicine, and (at my school at least) are much harder than Orgo."</p>
<p>Biochemistry - Yes. Would be very applicable.
Orgo too IS applicable. </p>
<p>As we have mentioned before, </p>
<p>You need understanding of structures, modifications of structures to understand bio-transformation ie metabolism, structure-activity-relationships, and to understand Pharmacology.</p>
<p>I will say this one last time… </p>
<p>If you do not understand Orgo, –> You will not understand Biochemistry or Pharmacology completely. </p>
<p>Without thorough knowledge of Biochem and Pharmacology ----> You will be a floundering Physician.</p>
<p>Do what you do very well OR get into some other area you actually can master!</p>
<p>But that’s not actually true. As norcalguy said, OChem made up only 9-10 out of 200 questions, or a bare 5%, of the MCAT question set he had to answer. How precisely can you really ascertain somebody’s OChem knowledge from just 9-10 questions? The sample size is simply too small. </p>
<p>Not only that, but the OChem questions are not broken out as a separate category but are rather folded into the biological sciences section of the MCAT. Hence, you don’t really know which questions the test-taker got right or wrong. If somebody happens to be terrible at OChem (but good at biology), you don’t really know that. </p>
<p>Hence, the situation is as I described it before: adcoms are basically outsourcing the OChem verification step to the undergrad programs, but to use business terminology, you are outsourcing to a supplier that has unreliable quality control. You don’t know what an ‘A’ in OChem really means: does it mean that the person was actually skillful at memorization, or does it mean that the person just happened to find an easy prof? </p>
<p>Like I said, if OChem was really such an important tool for checking somebody’s memorization capabilities, then you should probably test for it. Make OChem an entire section of the MCAT. Heck, run your own oral OChem exam as part of the interview process (hey, why not - during my grad school application interviews, I was asked a bunch of impromptu questions to see whether I knew what I was talking about). </p>
<p>By not doing that, you’re not really testing for OChem memorization ability at all. What you’re actually doing is just checking for good OChem grades, which is not the same thing. </p>
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<p>Obviously you will never be able to stop people from gaming the system completely. But that’s no excuse to not even try. </p>
<p>Like I said, the easiest ‘win’ would be simple: don’t rely on OChem grades. Instead, make OChem an entire section of the MCAT. Why not? If somebody really knows OChem well, then he will do well on this new MCAT section. </p>
<p>The greatest advantage is that such a system would be fair. Everybody would have to prove their knowledge on a standardized exam. Nobody would gain any advantage by going to an easier school or finding an easy prof. Hence, you would instantly remove all of those degrees of freedom and therefore have a far tightly controlled ‘experiment’. Would it be perfect? Of course not - no system ever is. But it would certainly be better than what we have now. </p>
<p>But that is, again, presuming that OChem is really such a useful method of measuring one’s memorization abilities for the purposes of determining who will be a good doctor. Like I said before, an even better method would probably be to test on biochemistry or molecular biology, as those topics are far more relevant than just straight OChem. </p>
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<p>Well, I know plenty of people who got worse than C’s in Orgo, and that clearly hurt them quite badly. Perhaps more importantly, plenty of people with C’s in OChem also got hurt. </p>
<p>But in any case, those people might have gotten better grades if they had just gone to an easier school or had an easier prof. That simply reinforces the notion that grades are not highly reliable.</p>