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Except that the MCAT measures at least some of the core competencies necessary for being a doctor, and includes a lot of vital information which, if you don't h

Except that the MCAT measures at least some of the core competencies necessary for being a doctor, and includes a lot of vital information which, if you don't have, make it pretty tough to be a physician. Even then, there are plenty of people whose MCAT scores were high enough to get them into medical school who ended up being terrible doctors, just as there are plenty of people who barely got into med school who ended up being terrific doctors. I can't cite any studies, but I imagine that just like anything else the variability within a score band is just as much as the variability between score bands. (Similarly: plenty of bad lawyers have passed the bar, just as plenty of good lawyers failed it before they passed. There's enough variability between the Bar exams of different states to make this possible. I suspect the same is true about engineering programs as well). It may just be that the MCAT is a good indicator of one's ability to become a doctor. Med school admissions are so competitive right now that these schools are able to be pretty selective about who they admit. It may be that these tests were designed at least in part by the professionals in those respective fields to measure knowledge and competencies that directly relate to the domains in question. More to the point, this is a specious comparison because the exams you cite are professional vocational exams which correspond to a specific career path/domain. There's no such vocational test that will adequately cover every child, nor do we even have philosophical agreement about the skills necessary to live a good life, much less the relative importance of such skills, and even if we did, there are so many different ways that things like literacy and numeracy manifest that it'd be downright impossible to construct a test that can even come close to measuring it. The tests you cite are tests that limit who can practice in a given profession, and while they're not perfect, I'll concede their usefulness. More importantly, they're on an individual basis. There'll definitely be some false-positives (people who are good at taking tests but poor at performing the basic skills necessary for competency) and false-negatives, but those can be corrected. It's a whole different ball-game when you're talking about a non-vocational test, particularly one aimed at people who are not yet adults and who have not yet chosen a particular career path.

djacobs 16y ago
The MCAT actually doesn't measure much in the way of knowledge, just of speed. The actual questions are easy, and your score (after a certain knowledge/intelligence threshold) is solely determined by how many practice questions you've waded through.
niels_olson 16y ago
>MCAT arguement The USMLE exams (Step I: basic science, Step IICK: clinical knowledge, Step IICS: clinical skills, and Step III: clinical problem solving) are more like the bar exams. > this is a specious comparison because the exams you cite are professional vocational exams which correspond to a specific career path/domain. Well, you're throwing in the MCAT, which is an aptitude test based on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, more like the GRE than the USMLE or bar exams. > there are so many different ways that things like literacy and numeracy manifest Literacy and numeracy can't be measured? You sure you want to hang your hat on that? Look, to quote Allah, I mean, pg, himself, (http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html) > To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect. We can easily modify this paragraph to most if not all domains and industries. I leave as an exercise to the reader to modify it for "improving education".

djacobs 16y ago

The MCAT actually doesn't measure much in the way of knowledge, just of speed. The actual questions are easy, and your score (after a certain knowledge/intelligence threshold) is solely determined by how many practice questions you've waded through.

niels_olson 16y ago

>MCAT arguement The USMLE exams (Step I: basic science, Step IICK: clinical knowledge, Step IICS: clinical skills, and Step III: clinical problem solving) are more like the bar exams. > this is a specious comparison because the exams you cite are professional vocational exams which correspond to a specific career path/domain. Well, you're throwing in the MCAT, which is an aptitude test based on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, more like the GRE than the USMLE or bar exams. > there are so many different ways that things like literacy and numeracy manifest Literacy and numeracy can't be measured? You sure you want to hang your hat on that? Look, to quote Allah, I mean, pg, himself, (http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html) > To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect. We can easily modify this paragraph to most if not all domains and industries. I leave as an exercise to the reader to modify it for "improving education".