Why is the entry criteria for Medicine so focused on grades?
Why is the entry criteria for Medicine so focused on grades and academic criteria when a lot of the best doctors are based on people who are able to speak to patients effectively and have people skills? It's turning into a mass of well qualified but not so good people who can understand people and work productively which is what one of the main attributes of a good doctor is.
It's focused on everything, including grades, which shows that you will be able to cope with the immense academic pressure put on you during the 5 year course.
Original post by 1lastchance
Why is the entry criteria for Medicine so focused on grades and academic criteria
Actually the UK is pretty unique in this NOT being the case. Work experience and/or voluntary work are basically mandatory for medicine applications. The vast majority of med schools interview candidates, which will eliminate the most socially dysfunctional.
In almost all other countries it all boils down to school grades or a written entry test. Unless you're America, where it comes down to how many musical instruments you play and how good you are at lacrosse.
Original post by 1lastchance
Why is the entry criteria for Medicine so focused on grades and academic criteria when a lot of the best doctors are based on people who are able to speak to patients effectively and have people skills? It's turning into a mass of well qualified but not so good people who can understand people and work productively which is what one of the main attributes of a good doctor is.
I think the admissions process has turned into more of a hoop jumping exercise (or at least reading posts on here, it seems that way), but I don't think those hoops are all related to grades!
What really annoys me is how these days you have to apply strategically to where you're most likely to get into as opposed to where you'd actually most like to go.
For a start it's not, you need lots of work experience and extracurricular activities proving you have good communication skills etc., and I don't know about you but I'd like the doctor who has literally has my life in their hands to be academically competent, wouldn't you?
Original post by 1lastchance
Why is the entry criteria for Medicine so focused on grades and academic criteria when a lot of the best doctors are based on people who are able to speak to patients effectively and have people skills? It's turning into a mass of well qualified but not so good people who can understand people and work productively which is what one of the main attributes of a good doctor is.
As others have said: medicine is an academically demanding degree in which you'll most likely be studying at some level for most of your career. Plenty of people with bad grades do become doctors in the UK by making use of the graduate entry programmes at various medical schools (since most of them don't have A Level requirements, only degree classification requirements). People skills alone won't make a good doctor. And as somebody else has said, the interview and the requirement for work experience/voluntary work pretty much excludes everybody who can't hold a conversation.
Also, it's about supply and demand. Medicine is so oversubscribed that people are willing to use all sorts of backdoors to become doctors. The admissions team at any medical school in the UK has hundreds of impossible choices to make. Just about everybody who applies will have the grades, the experience, the voluntary work, the shiny personal statement. That's one reason why the grade requirements are rising: it makes the job of the admissions people easier. Those who don't satisfy the academic criteria for what is an academically demanding degree are basically the lowest hanging fruit and the most easily rejected.
Original post by 1lastchance
Why is the entry criteria for Medicine so focused on grades and academic criteria when a lot of the best doctors are based on people who are able to speak to patients effectively and have people skills? It's turning into a mass of well qualified but not so good people who can understand people and work productively which is what one of the main attributes of a good doctor is.
yea, it has mostly been said above. Grades are a big thing, but not the only thing.
I think it's important to recognise that medicine is massively oversubscribed here in the UK. That's the biggest factor.
In my honest opinion (I'm 3rd year) I don't think the degree requires the kind of person who can get 3 As (or indeed more nowadays). But there are so many people applying for so few places, so they need to find ways of cutting those numbers down. The easiest ways are through grades (AAA is generous when you consider that engineering courses, Maths, Physics etc. at the highest ranked universities often expect more than AAA, despite medicine being more competitive) and through entrance exams. Medical admissions is really a long hurdle jumping exercise. There are plenty of other hurdles, such as work exp, volunteering, MMIs etc.
You should also consider why there are so few medical places in universities. We have a shortage of doctors (you might want to google the current row on junior doctors minimum hours and pay), and the government control how many medicine places universities have. So why not increase them?
Well perhaps it's because there's no money. It was estimated that the cost of training a medical student all the way to qualification was £250,000, which is a lot more than the tuition fee. So the government would rather encourage doctors trained abroad to come and work in the UK, instead of paying for their training. Perhaps it's a political problem. For example, a politician might commit to increasing number of doctors by a certain number before the next election. So how do they increase the numbers in such a short amount of time? Well not through increasing uni places. You attract doctors from abroad.
Do you see how this is a chain of problems that lead to high grade requirements?
Original post by jazjaz
I think it's competition. Speak to most docs in their 30s upwards and they only had to get BBB for med school and still make fantastic doctors.
It's competition as well as the fact that Bs were apparently harder to get when those doctors sat their A Levels - that's another reason for rising requirements in not just medicine but other courses as well. It's difficult to make decisions when 25 percent of people are getting As (don't quote me on that, Good Bloke mentioned it on another thread).
(edited 8 years ago)
Original post by Pride
yea, it has mostly been said above. Grades are a big thing, but not the only thing.
I think it's important to recognise that medicine is massively oversubscribed here in the UK. That's the biggest factor.
In my honest opinion (I'm 3rd year) I don't think the degree requires the kind of person who can get 3 As (or indeed more nowadays). But there are so many people applying for so few places, so they need to find ways of cutting those numbers down. The easiest ways are through grades (AAA is generous when you consider that engineering courses, Maths, Physics etc. at the highest ranked universities often expect more than AAA, despite medicine being more competitive) and through entrance exams. Medical admissions is really a long hurdle jumping exercise. There are plenty of other hurdles, such as work exp, volunteering, MMIs etc.
You should also consider why there are so few medical places in universities. We have a shortage of doctors (you might want to google the current row on junior doctors minimum hours and pay), and the government control how many medicine places universities have. So why not increase them?
Well perhaps it's because there's no money. It was estimated that the cost of training a medical student all the way to qualification was £250,000, which is a lot more than the tuition fee. So the government would rather encourage doctors trained abroad to come and work in the UK, instead of paying for their training. Perhaps it's a political problem. For example, a politician might commit to increasing number of doctors by a certain number before the next election. So how do they increase the numbers in such a short amount of time? Well not through increasing uni places. You attract doctors from abroad.
Do you see how this is a chain of problems that lead to high grade requirements?
I think it's important to recognise that medicine is massively oversubscribed here in the UK. That's the biggest factor.
In my honest opinion (I'm 3rd year) I don't think the degree requires the kind of person who can get 3 As (or indeed more nowadays). But there are so many people applying for so few places, so they need to find ways of cutting those numbers down. The easiest ways are through grades (AAA is generous when you consider that engineering courses, Maths, Physics etc. at the highest ranked universities often expect more than AAA, despite medicine being more competitive) and through entrance exams. Medical admissions is really a long hurdle jumping exercise. There are plenty of other hurdles, such as work exp, volunteering, MMIs etc.
You should also consider why there are so few medical places in universities. We have a shortage of doctors (you might want to google the current row on junior doctors minimum hours and pay), and the government control how many medicine places universities have. So why not increase them?
Well perhaps it's because there's no money. It was estimated that the cost of training a medical student all the way to qualification was £250,000, which is a lot more than the tuition fee. So the government would rather encourage doctors trained abroad to come and work in the UK, instead of paying for their training. Perhaps it's a political problem. For example, a politician might commit to increasing number of doctors by a certain number before the next election. So how do they increase the numbers in such a short amount of time? Well not through increasing uni places. You attract doctors from abroad.
Do you see how this is a chain of problems that lead to high grade requirements?
The A** grade should be coming in any year now...
Or they might do what they did with GCSEs and change over to 1 - 9 where an 8 is equivalent to an A* in the old system and the 9 is a 'super A*.'
I'd rather see a doctor who is a good diagnostician with poor people skills than a nice but useless doctor. Being good at diagnosing means years of learning about the body and common and rare things that can go wrong with it. There is a LOT of stuff to learn and memorise and be able to recall.
There are plenty of less intellectually demanding jobs out there for people with lower grades who want to work with people. Dumbing down medicine won't help anyone.
There are plenty of less intellectually demanding jobs out there for people with lower grades who want to work with people. Dumbing down medicine won't help anyone.
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