“When doctors misdiagnose patients, people die.” This is true to a certain extent. But Elon Musk Share this observation The discussion about X was not about medical malpractice, but about the fact that heThe virus of the awakened mindStory by Aaron Sibarium of Washington Free Beacon had Revealed There were complaints that UCLA’s medical school was admitting applicants partly on the basis of race — a practice long since banned in California public schools — and the article argued that the process was not just discriminatory but potentially destructive to the public.
of Free Beacon School of Medicine US News & World Report Since 2020, the ranking has dropped from 6th to 18th, and the article shares leaked data showing underachieving students. Shelf Test(These assessments are used in preparation for the national licensing exam that all MDs must pass before practicing medicine in the United States.) According to Sibarium, nearly a quarter of the class of 2025 failed at least three shelf exams, and more than half of students in training in internal medicine, family medicine, emergency medicine, or pediatrics will fail tests in those subjects at some point in the 2022-23 academic year, and these struggles have led many trainees to postpone taking the national licensing exam. “I don’t know how some of these students are going to make it into residency,” an anonymous UCLA professor told him. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”
Stephen Dubinett, dean of the UCLA School of Medicine, denied the report. He told me that the admissions committee does not give preferential treatment to applicants based on race, and said that statements that his students struggle are “malicious and completely untrue.” Dubinett believes that it is anti-DEI sentiment on and off campus that has sparked the controversy. “People think that diversity, equity, and inclusion are somehow against them, and that couldn’t be further from the truth,” he said. But the stakes are high, for both future physicians and patients. Free BeaconThe claims have drawn attention to a fierce debate among medical educators about how much admissions standards and test scores actually matter, and whether they have any bearing on what it means to be a good doctor.
Sibarium argues that UCLA’s falling rankings and declining test scores are due in part to its race-based admissions system. The latter metric “occurred during the same time period as a steep decline in Asian enrollment” and is linked to changes in medical school admissions standards, the article states. Dubinett told me the drop in shelf test scores is “modest.” He also pointed to data UCLA shared with the UCLA community after the report’s release. Free Beacon According to the article, in the most recent series of exams administered in 2023-2024, all test-takers passed in surgery, neurology, and emergency medicine. Data also shows that pass rates in most other specialties were close to the expected benchmark of 95%. Additionally, as of 2022-2023, 99% of UCLA medical students passed the second of the three exams required for medical licensure on the first try, and scores over the past three years have been above the national average.
on the other hand, Free Beacon There has been little beyond speculation about how UCLA’s changing racial makeup is related to the school’s academic problems. Nationwide, black and Hispanic medical students are A little low According to statistics compiled by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the grades and scores on American medical school entrance exams are lower than those of whites and Asians. However, University of California, Los Angeles And that AAMC We can see that the average MCAT score for UCLA medical school applicants has not declined in recent years. In terms of grades, the average GPA for UCLA applicants is 3.8, which is up from 2010. 3.7 Dubinett said the school has set minimum MCAT scores and GPAs to ensure a high graduation rate. “These standards are based on national data, not something we made up behind the scenes,” he said. “We have nearly 14,000 students applying for 173 spots. Are we really going to get people who aren’t qualified?”
so what did Will we suddenly see a situation in 2022 where a lot of students are doing poorly on shelf exams? Free Beacon The medical school Major Update It was added to the curriculum in 2020. National trendsUCLA has significantly reduced the amount of time students spend in the classroom so that they can start their clinical training a year earlier. Try Universities are trying to expose students to real-world experience earlier, working on the principle that facts learned from books are worthless without hands-on training. But shelf exams require students to memorize large amounts of facts, which only gets harder with less time to study. Dubinett attributes the initial drop in scores to students taking the exams earlier in their education. He cited five other medical schools as well. Also reported Declining shelf test performance under compressed curricula.
Whether medical schools’ big shifts away from traditional coursework are producing better doctors overall is another question: new curricula that lead to lower standardized test scores in the short term may actually produce better or even better doctors in the long term. bad Clinical care. no one Really know There is still no reliable way to track the quality of education. Controversial—US News Medical school rankings, for example, are not a direct assessment of how good a program is at training future physicians, and the benefits (or costs) of changing medical school admissions standards are similarly shrouded in mystery. study There are 87 different personal qualities that may be beneficial in the practice of medicine, and no one knows which ones are most important.
UCLA not only condenses boring but important scientific material with an emphasis on hands-on experience, but also gives students Social Awareness. in Previous Reports of Free BeaconSibarium explained structural racism and the health equity imperative course According to the 2023-24 curriculum for first-year students: Free Beaconaims to help students “develop a structurally competent and anti-racist lens through which to view and treat health and illness” and encourages them to become “physician advocates both inside and outside of clinical settings.” Free Beacon Dubinett called attention to the course’s pro-Palestinian, anti-capitalist, and obesity activist messaging this year. The article quoted Jeffrey Fryer, a former dean of Harvard Medical School, who called the course “truly shocking” and “based on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate.” (Dubinet told me the entire first-year curriculum is under evaluation.) Other academics have expressed concern about how medicine might change if a similar approach to educating students were adopted on a large scale. The school’s focus on racism and inequality “comes at the expense of rigorous medical training. The prospect of this ‘new’ politicized medical education should worry all Americans,” said Stanley Goldfarb, a former vice dean at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. 2019 Editorial in of The Wall Street Journal. in Follow-up from 2022He warned of a “woke health care takeover.”
What exactly makes medical school “woke”? Any doctor can tell you that unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity affects people’s health, and that many diseases occur disproportionately along racial lines. Doctors who study these topics in school are More Conscious In fact, Goldfarb’s first essay journalSome doctors Share your story Supporting this claim, posts under the hashtag #GoldfarbChallenge explain that helping patients navigate tough life situations is as much a part of the job as remembering the nuances of biochemistry.
Acknowledging inequality is not an entirely new phenomenon in medicine. When I was a student at the University of Rochester 10 years ago, the school was already offering classes on cultural competency and health disparities. The difference is that they almost always openly supported political activism from a left-wing perspective. I did attend a few lectures on how to care for patients from different backgrounds, but I never heard a single class member say, “I’m not a doctor. I …Free, Free PalestineThe incident, titled “The University of California, San Diego,” allegedly took place during a freshman class at UCLA this spring. Since I graduated, the AAMC hasDiversity, Equity, and Inclusion CompetenciesThe guidance encourages trainees to “influence decision makers and other vested interest groups” by advocating for “public policies that promote social justice and address the social determinants of health.” The guidance cites “colonization, white supremacy, acculturation, and assimilation” as “systems of oppression” whose effects must be remedied. This new educational approach comes at a time when US physician associations have been vocally taking positions on controversial issues such as: Gun violence, Transgender Rightsand Mask wearing compulsory.
I suspect this leftward shift in medicine was born out of a sense of helplessness, not some Marxist conspiracy. Doctors are better at changing a person’s physiology than they are at improving the social and economic circumstances of their patients. Perhaps medical schools think that health outcomes would improve if doctors were more involved in progressive politics. But whatever the intention, this approach will alienate many patients. In recent months, some doctors have been disciplined for expressing pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli positions. Perhaps they did so because of potential patients who expressed pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli positions. It may offend By their politics. Perhaps the same caution should be applied to medical school lectures at UCLA.
There has also been a noticeable movement to increase student diversity. 20th centurySchools once encouraged med school applicants to fit the typical profile of a hard-working lab animal. In the past few decades, that attitude has changed. Now, admissions offices are becoming more comfortable with the idea that students who aren’t focused on the hard sciences or have perfect academic records can still be successful, or even better, doctors.
I credit this change with getting into medical school myself. I was a socially minded liberal arts student who decided to study linguistics after struggling in organic chemistry. By the time I applied, some schools had decided that MCAT scores were not the final determining factor in whether or not someone would become a good doctor. My university was very interested in attracting the kind of students who would enrich the campus that it does today. Calls “Diversity of educational and experiential backgrounds” allowed me to avoid taking any exams at all. I ended up struggling academically, but barely passed anatomy (and didn’t get other questions right, like how many teeth a human has), and now I’m a professor in medicine myself.
Even today, aspiring physicians are expected to master vast amounts of detailed knowledge, but only through clinical training do they learn which facts are most important, and nowhere is this more evident than when you see a patient live or die depending on what you know or how well you communicate it. Free Beacon The article quoted one faculty member as saying that a student “could not identify a major artery” in the operating room. To be asked to identify an artery on the spot and fail the task is, frankly, Rite of passage For medical students, more people are hurt by doctors who don’t speak Spanish or build rapport than by doctors who forget the names of their blood vessels. The debate over what health care professionals should know continues because the answers are as varied as the patients themselves.
