3 ms·
It doesn't take above average intelligence to go through med school, so long as you have high discipline and motivation. Good memory helps the most, really. Th
by sudosysgen 3y ago
It doesn't take above average intelligence to go through med school, so long as you have high discipline and motivation. Good memory helps the most, really.
There is a simple way to know that we could train more doctors - failure rates are very low, which means that either the MCAT is a better filter than the exams (unlikely!), or that it would be possible to train a lot more doctors.
- sarchertech 3y agoThe failure rate in all graduate education is low, because you’re only taking people who have already performed well for 4 years in undergrad. For med school specifically, you’re only taking the top performers, then of those you’re filtering further based on MCAT scores. If you’re that selective and you already have a 15-20% failure rate, I’m not sure that lowering the entry requirements is a great use of resources. You don’t really want a 40% failure rate. That’s a lot of wasted time, effort, and money. There are already many alternate career paths for medical practitioners who can’t make it into med school or just don’t want to spend as much time in training.
- nradov 3y agoObviously it would be possible to run more students through medical school but that wouldn't give us more practicing doctors. The real bottleneck is in residency slots at teaching hospitals. For peculiar historical reasons almost all graduate medical education is funded by the Federal government through the Medicare program and Congress has been unwilling to increase that. https://savegme.org/ https://savegme.org/