As someone who went to medical school, this makes a lot of sense. 4th year of medical school was filled with elective time and could have been mostly skipped.

As someone who went to medical school, this makes a lot of sense. 4th year of medical school was filled with elective time and could have been mostly skipped. Don't think combining that year with others would be hard at all. On the other hand I don't necessarily agree that residencies necessarily need to be shorter ( as someone else commented here ) At least, im not sure to what advantage it would serve. Residency is a matter of real life on-the-job experience. You can start graduating people early but then you are just graduating less experienced people. It's hard to compress the same work experience in a shorter amount of time, at least with the hours restrictions that are in place. And unlike my 4th year of medical school, my residency had much less downtime.