Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Recommendation for change in MD education in the US

I think that eliminating the requirement of a four year college degree as a prerequisite to admission to medical school is long overdue. Prospective MD's basically mark time in undergraduate school, as the course of study in undergraduate is irrelevant to the medical school admissions process.

A better process would simply to base the admission decision in part on high school performance along with the MCAT result and whatever the other criteria that medical schools now use. The chain of predictors of success from high school performance to undergraduate performance to success in med school correlate well, I think. So cutting out the undergraduate step wouldn't change the quality of med school graduates and would eliminate a huge waste of time and money for taxpayers and prospective MD's.

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