<p>Pharmagal, come on! What we are talking about is making the admissions process more relevant and more fair. Obviously adcoms can force premeds to complete 2 orgo courses, just like adcoms probably can force premeds to run a marathon. But why do that if you can run an admissions process that is more relevant. Again, the idea is that we want to admit future competent doctors, not future organic chemists. </p>
<p>My question to you is, why do you insist on defending an inefficient system? As Dean Alpern said, he has never seen the Diels-Alder reaction mentioned even once in all his years in the business. So why force premeds to learn it? More generally, why shouldn’t we be always looking to make improvements in the process? It seems to me that you simply don’t want the process to improve, and if so, please just come right out and say so. </p>
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<p>First off, it’s not just a matter of “one or two B’s”, but can obviously be a lot worse than that. </p>
<p>But more importantly, even if it was just a matter of 1 or 2 B’s, the fact remains that the process is competitive and so you will still look bad compared to somebody who got all A’s, perhaps because he just took easy classes at an easy school. Which, again, harkens back to the use of a completely fair and standardized test like the MCAT where you don’t have to worry about different grading standards.</p>
<p>The way the system is designed is that a qualified applicant won’t get unfairly rejected multiple times. People will sometimes slip through the cracks- it’s unavoidable. But if they quit after one setback, they probably weren’t meant for it in the first place. Each MCAT is good for 3 years after the date the student takes it. If someone truly wants to become a doctor, they’ll find a way. Working for a year after college and re-applying is a route that many people take, and they seem to do just fine. To my way of thinking, people should always have a plan B, and people need to realize that getting rejected is not the end of the world. 23 is still early enough to get started.</p>
<p>Actually, I’m not sure about that. You get bad grades, possibly because you took some very difficult courses, those bad grades stay with you for life. Hence, if you get rejected because of your poor grades in one application cycle, you are likely to get rejected in the next cycle because of the same bad grades. Hence, the rejection chances are correlated.</p>
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<p>What concerns me is the inefficiency in the present system. Sure, somebody who gets rejected unfairly may be able to get in the next time around. But that’s clearly not efficient for him and not efficient for society, as that basically means that the nation is deprived of that person’s medical services for a year (and the US health care system doesn’t score all that highly to begin with). </p>
<p>Now, certainly, I agree that there will always be some level of inefficiency. You will always have some people slipping through the cracks. But that isn’t an excuse to just throw your hands up in the air and do nothing. You should always be trying to improve your processes to eliminate sources of inefficiency.</p>
<p>If bad grades are the weak point on your application, you make up for it somewhere else: Work experience, other post-grad degrees, more volunteering, etc. If you sit and do nothing to improve your app. before the next cycle, yeah, you will likely get bounced again, but most people continue to strengthen their application. </p>
<p>Efficient how, though? All the spots are filled each year, so it’s inefficient for the person who doesn’t get in, but society still gets a doctor. Whether the person who gets that spot is the best choice is totally subjective. What a super MCAT would do is help out people who are excellent students the afternoon they take the test. Maybe the new system should require two MCAT tests on successive years, to show a degree of consistency. </p>
<p>We have practicing MDs come in for lecture all the time and explain that some of the stuff we learn the first couple years is ONLY for the boards, and that we won’t need to have it readily available from memory. It’s important that you knew it at one point. A practicing MD will not do as well on their boards as they did at the end of their second year. The facts are floating around somewhere, though, so that if one of those one in a million cases comes along, it gives you a tickling in the back of your brain that you’ve seen something before.</p>
<p>Testing for relevant knowledge sounds great, but I think it would be like having tryouts for a track team. Two kids run a race in the same time, but one has terrible form, and the other has been coached extensively beforehand. Having one super MCAT will likely go the same way as the SAT did- originally provide a measure of equality, but one that lessens down the road. People will start to take prep courses, etc. which gives an advantage to people that can afford them. I’m not sure whether one giant standardized test will improve efficiency, or just move it around.</p>
<p>The question is not whether medical school material is relevant to practice, but whether organic is relevant to medical school or at least to medical school admissions as a proxy for specific skills.</p>
<p>Note also, that the visiting docs said only that some material is only for the boards.</p>
<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>
<p>That reminds me of a poplular OR joke (told by my general surgeon buddy).</p>
<p>Requirements for acceptance in an ortho residency: bottom 10% of the class and ability to bench press your body weight.
Requirements for general surgery residency: same as ortho, minus bench press requirement.</p>
<p>Fine, not totally subjective. But a guy with Asperger’s syndrome will do very well on an MCAT. Probably not the “best” doctor, even though his numbers are better. There are too many intangibles, some of which are beyond a medical student’s control, e.g. surveys showing that people prefer a doctor of the same gender and race.</p>
<p>I wish there were numbers on this to see whether or not grade deflation/inflation is as big a problem as you claim it is. As it is, I would wager that it’s a very small portion of the total students that apply to medical school. And kids that actually try at Caltech or MIT will likely not have borderline mcats. The ones that do are fairly small.</p>
<p>And I think orgo is more relevant than physics was.</p>
<p>And similarly, a guy with Asperger’s will probably get very high grades because, for the same reasons that such a guy can probably study hard and memorize a lot of facts (and not really care about partying and the college social scene) in order to do well on the MCAT, he can do the same to get high grades. </p>
<p>Hence, nobody is saying that you should rely solely on the MCAT. You would still have the interview. You would still have the essay. But those processes are fair too, in the sense that applicant who gets an interview at Harvard Medical School will be run through a process that he cannot control ex-ante. No applicant can ‘strategize’ by, say, specifically choosing the ‘easy’ interviewer in the way that a premed student can strategize by choosing easy classes. </p>
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<p>Well, right there is part of the problem: a lot of potential students don’t even apply because they know they won’t be able to get in. If you have a 30 MCAT, but a 2.3 GPA from Caltech, you probably won’t even apply to med-school. You know you won’t get in with those kinds of terrible grades, so why waste the time and money in applying? But that same student might have gotten a 3.3 GPA at some easy school (as well as the same 30 on the MCAT), and then he probably would have applied. In other words, plenty of people are eliminated before they even apply. Any study of the impacts of grade deflation would necessarily need to include them. </p>
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<p>Caltech and MIT are just the most obvious examples. Plenty of large public schools (i.e. Berkeley, Georgia Tech) are also noted for their grade deflation. </p>
<p>But like I said, the real problem is not so much between schools but rather between classes in the same school. Some profs who teach different sections of the very same class at the same school will nonetheless grade with very different curves. Hence, the strategy then is to figure out who the easy profs are and to take classes under them.</p>
<p>org chem is a necessary requirement because ten or twenty years out of college you will not remember basic principles of organic chemistry unless you were forced to learn ten times more in college. students will forget 90% of the material after taking exams. so, if you have them study only basics, they will not have any understanding of chemistry whatsoever.</p>
<p>I have no issue with premeds studying some OChem. The issue is *which parts * of OChem should they have to study. If they will never need to know certain topics, then it is questionable whether they should be forced to study them.</p>