The system is broken

[Henry415]

2 minutes ago, frenchpress said:

Literally anything. That’s my point. My application was almost entirely work related, some mentoring within my career field, some farming related stuff, and a whole bunch of hobbies including playing video games, playing dungeons, playing an instrument, cooking, and reading a lot of books on my kobo. 

Thanks for your response. You mention among other things, playing video games and cooking as things you actually put down as extracurriculars. How are those things even tangentially related to medicine let alone good indicators of how well someone will perform as a doctor?? I'm not going to buy an argument of "Oh! Look at how much time and dedication this person spend playing League of Legends or Animal Crossing! Surely, this level of dedication will mean that this may translate into dedication towards caring for patients." Could you imagine if a software engineer put these things down on their resume?

[Henry415]

34 minutes ago, frenchpress said:

All I can think reading this thread is that if the OP thinks med school admissions is unfair, they’ll really hate CaRMS. 

I don't know much about CaRMS, but from what I have heard, the fam med situation is a complete shit show. Thank God I took a complete 180 in my career several years ago...

[frenchpress]

20 minutes ago, Henry415 said:

Thanks for your response. You mention among other things, playing video games and cooking as things you actually put down as extracurriculars. How are those things even tangentially related to medicine let alone good indicators of how well someone will perform as a doctor?? I'm not going to buy an argument of "Oh! Look at how much time and dedication this person spend playing League of Legends or Animal Crossing! Surely, this level of dedication will mean that this may translate into dedication towards caring for patients." Could you imagine if a software engineer put these things down on their resume?

I can actually. As someone who has also been a software engineer I can confirm that many in the field would look favourably at such things on a resume. Software engineers are classically nerds after all. It suggests you’re a human and not a robot. 
 

But again, that’s my point. It’s not some special dedication. It’s normal person stuff. The vast majority of people who have 1) put enough time into school to get good grades, and 2) have a somewhat varied life and interests and things they can commit to spend time on, can make good doctors.

So a large majority of the people who apply to medical school would make decent doctors, regardless of their extra curriculars. And in my experience, having the sort of resume that is classically assumed to make someone a good doctor, does not ensure you won’t be shit at the job.

In my opinion, what it takes to make a good doctor is being smart enough to learn a little about a lot of shit, stubborn enough to stick to it when everyone in the field around you makes you feel like shit, and decent enough to try to continue care about patients who drive you crazy at least 50% of the time. And I don’t think you can screen for that. No one can really evaluate if you’ll be good at it until they see you do it, and most doctors honestly don’t know if they’ll even like the job until they’ve lived it - there’s a lot of miserable doctors out there who had no idea what they were getting into.

So admissions is essentially random, and I honestly can’t see a way to improve it. But that doesn’t mean you have to waste your time on stuff you hate to get an equal chance as the next person at being accepted!
 

[Pakoon]

37 minutes ago, Henry415 said:

Thanks for your response. You mention among other things, playing video games and cooking as things you actually put down as extracurriculars. How are those things even tangentially related to medicine let alone good indicators of how well someone will perform as a doctor?? I'm not going to buy an argument of "Oh! Look at how much time and dedication this person spend playing League of Legends or Animal Crossing! Surely, this level of dedication will mean that this may translate into dedication towards caring for patients." Could you imagine if a software engineer put these things down on their resume?

What are you expecting? " Now for your next assessment person straight out of whatever science degree, here is a 76 year old male with bowel cancer, operate to show you'll be such an amazing doctor" or even better "we've given each applicant 5 patients, we'll check back in 2 weeks and the person with the most patients left wins!!!!!!" Like what do you even mean by this statement. There's no way you can DIRECTLY measurement of how good a person, let alone a kid out of undergrad will be as a doctor. There's barely a metric for how good a DOCTOR is as a DOCTOR....

 

The reality is the vast majority of matriculants have excelled academically and have proved this through their GPA and MCAT score, showing they'll be good enough to apply medicine from a knowledge standpoint. Admission committees are just looking for someone who has done things outside of school (yes literally anything, even video games) and is personal (this is what interviews are for btw). 

 

Your argument has very little ground to stand on, and at this point I'm sure you're trolling.

[Henry415]

6 minutes ago, Pakoon said:

What are you expecting? " Now for your next assessment person straight out of whatever science degree, here is a 76 year old male with bowel cancer, operate to show you'll be such an amazing doctor" or even better "we've given each applicant 5 patients, we'll check back in 2 weeks and the person with the most patients left wins!!!!!!" Like what do you even mean by this statement. There's no way you can DIRECTLY measurement of how good a person, let alone a kid out of undergrad will be as a doctor. There's barely a metric for how good a DOCTOR is as a DOCTOR....

 

The reality is the vast majority of matriculants have excelled academically and have proved this through their GPA and MCAT score, showing they'll be good enough to apply medicine from a knowledge standpoint. Admission committees are just looking for someone who has done things outside of school (yes literally anything, even video games) and is personal (this is what interviews are for btw). 

 

Your argument has very little ground to stand on, and at this point I'm sure you're trolling.

Nope. But I'm pretty sure we can do better than using metrics that value playing video games and cooking. 

On another note - hey! It's someone from the admissions committee who is lashing out because a system they represent is being criticized. Who could've known? Do you have any opinions of your own on how the admissions process can be improved? Or are you going to defend it to the death and expect future applicants to be like sheep and adhere to whatever the admission process asks of them without question?

[frenchpress]

22 minutes ago, Henry415 said:

Nope. But I'm pretty sure we can do better than using metrics that value playing video games and cooking.

You say this (and seem to think very little of video games and cooking), but the hand eye coordination involved in both is actually an incredibly useful skill when you’re suturing, putting in a central line, doing laparoscopic surgery, etc.

And it’s helpful to be a good cook when you work 80 hours a week and you need some tasty joy in your life because if you eat one more Tim Hortons sandwich from the cafeteria at 9pm on call you might have to go into a stairwell and cry. Those are the real soft skills they’re looking for 

[Bobthebuilder]

7 hours ago, Henry415 said:

Nope. But I'm pretty sure we can do better than using metrics that value playing video games and cooking. 

On another note - hey! It's someone from the admissions committee who is lashing out because a system they represent is being criticized. Who could've known? Do you have any opinions of your own on how the admissions process can be improved? Or are you going to defend it to the death and expect future applicants to be like sheep and adhere to whatever the admission process asks of them without question?

Didnt want to react before but now you are just being disrespecful. 

Some of us are doing volunteering work, extracurriculars and are getting involved in our communities because we actually enjoy helping out and doing stuff outside of medecine.  Transversal compentencies we developped while being involved in these activies are essential to medecine. To me, they are infinitely more important than your MCAT score. However, I agree with you that some people might do these activities just for the sake of getting admitted (I'd argue there are very few) but that doesn't change the fact they acquired essential skills doing them. 

I'm a proponent of Université Laval's way of doing admissions. They have a cutoff for GPA and then everything else depends on your CASPer and interview +/- CV. 

Two last things. There is like 10 academically qualified candidates for every spot in Canadian Med Schools. At some point, it doesn't matter if you had 3.7 or 3.99. You've shown your ability to learn. What you need to do is show you have the ability to become a good doctor and a good medical student. Finally, whatever system you choose, people of lower socioeconomic backgrounds will be at a disadvantage. (whether you favor MCAT, GPA or extracurriculars) Knowing this, choosing a more hollistic approach is, in my opinion, a better option than going for a ''higher is better'' type of system. 

Have a good day,

Bob

[Sceptical]

I'll repost the same comment I made to this thread: 

Although that discussion is specifically on the CARMS match, I think it is also relevant when looking at MD admissions. I agree with @Bobthebuilder, however a "holistic" approach (whatever that means) does have the risk of making the selection process less transparent. 

[Findanus]

I agree that much of medical school admissions criteria are asinine fluff that favors the wealthy, distracts from actual learning or time spent on useful things instead of resume padding activities, and tends to breed a sense of sanctimoniousness in those who go through with the ritual and are successful, when in reality they were just jumping through hoops.

 

There is demographic homogeneity in med school classes, being comprised of mostly the children of the wealthy and connected.

 

A possible way to ensure diversity and fairness would be to account for only GPA with a modifier depending on course difficulty, and MCAT scores. I would go as far as to say interviews could be done away with as these favor the attractive and outgoing. All the people that meet cutoffs would be put in a lottery and randomly chosen.

[Sceptical]

11 minutes ago, Findanus said:

I agree that much of medical school admissions criteria are asinine fluff that favors the wealthy, distracts from actual learning or time spent on useful things instead of resume padding activities, and tends to breed a sense of sanctimoniousness in those who go through with the ritual and are successful, when in reality they were just jumping through hoops.

 

There is demographic homogeneity in med school classes, being comprised of mostly the children of the wealthy and connected.

 

A possible way to ensure diversity and fairness would be to account for only GPA with a modifier depending on course difficulty, and MCAT scores. I would go as far as to say interviews could be done away with as these favor the attractive and outgoing. All the people that meet cutoffs would be put in a lottery and randomly chosen.

Yes, I think @SpeakWhitefrom my previously linked thread was advocating for sortition.

[Henry415]

20 minutes ago, Findanus said:

I agree that much of medical school admissions criteria are asinine fluff that favors the wealthy, distracts from actual learning or time spent on useful things instead of resume padding activities, and tends to breed a sense of sanctimoniousness in those who go through with the ritual and are successful, when in reality they were just jumping through hoops.

 

There is demographic homogeneity in med school classes, being comprised of mostly the children of the wealthy and connected.

 

A possible way to ensure diversity and fairness would be to account for only GPA with a modifier depending on course difficulty, and MCAT scores. I would go as far as to say interviews could be done away with as these favor the attractive and outgoing. All the people that meet cutoffs would be put in a lottery and randomly chosen.

On the point of standardizing GPA score based on difficulty: I 100% agree with this. I don’t understand why some schools don’t apply a standardization formula of: Standardized grade = (Grade attained - Average grade) / Standard deviation. This would weed out people who take like a million GPA booster courses with class averages of like 90%

[Sceptical]

51 minutes ago, Henry415 said:

On the point of standardizing GPA score based on difficulty: I 100% agree with this. I don’t understand why some schools don’t apply a standardization formula of: Standardized grade = (Grade attained - Average grade) / Standard deviation. This would weed out people who take like a million GPA booster courses with class averages of like 90%

Grade inflation has been a persistent problems for years, in particular in premed classes. There is no incentive for universities to adhere to a formula that would reverse this trend as many competitive processes rely in part on GPA (e.g. admissions into professional schools/grad schools, awarding and maintenance of scholarships), and unis would not want to disadvantage their own students against other schools for the same scholarships. As a previous TA, I've had innumerable students ask me to bump their grades up to the next GPA tier or to remove a bad mark. 

On the admissions side, I only know of Quebec schools that do convert GPA into R-score which do take into account the factors you mentioned. I am not sure why other schools don't follow suit, but GPA prolly becomes meaningless between MD candidates once it reaches a certain threshold. 

No matter how one maintains or adjusts selection parameters, people will always find a way to optimize this, and often the privileged will be the first to exploit this due to available resources, time, etc. If having a GPA of 4 is what is needed, people will be shopping around for undergrad programs that offer that...and if you browse PM101 long enough, you will know which programs I am talking about. Incidentally, this just shifts part of the "hypercompetitive-ness" over from the MD application to application into these programs.

[zxcccxz]

16 hours ago, Henry415 said:

But at least for most jobs, the criteria they look for are directly relevant to the job itself. Tell me how it's not a waste of an applicant's time to demand that they have hundreds of hours of diverse experiences to show they are a "well rounded" person. Is the profession of medicine really require so many multi-faceted experience in practice? 

I personally think medicine is an overrated profession in Canada (and North America, to a certain extent) because of the unfounded respect people seem to give to the amount of suffer hustling required to become a doctor. It's almost as if people are impressed by the fact that someone has spend thousands of hours grinding years of their life away on some pointless extracurricular activities. Are we so pretentious in Canada to think that our doctors are so much better than in the UK, for example (where you literally get into med school straight out of high school). Last I checked, doctors do the same thing more or less in Europe.

Damn boi you need a nephrology consult? Cause you saltyyyyy

[Henry415]

1 hour ago, zxcccxz said:

Damn boi you need a nephrology consult? Cause you saltyyyyy

Nah bro, I’m already making bank as a software engineer, and I enjoy the work too. Thanks for the concern tho.

[RagnarOdinson]

 

On 4/12/2023 at 11:54 PM, Henry415 said:

Thanks for your response. You mention among other things, playing video games and cooking as things you actually put down as extracurriculars. How are those things even tangentially related to medicine let alone good indicators of how well someone will perform as a doctor?? I'm not going to buy an argument of "Oh! Look at how much time and dedication this person spend playing League of Legends or Animal Crossing! Surely, this level of dedication will mean that this may translate into dedication towards caring for patients." Could you imagine if a software engineer put these things down on their resume?

If ppl with your dismissive attitude and inability to approach an argument with nuance/ accepting feedback are getting screened out by adcoms, maybe the system isn't as bad as I thought... 

[Henry415]

21 minutes ago, RagnarOdinson said:

 

If ppl with your dismissive attitude and inability to approach an argument with nuance/ accepting feedback are getting screened out by adcoms, maybe the system isn't as bad as I thought... 

Why are you making this about me? I’m not even trying to apply to med school. My rant is the personification of the attitude that many people I actually know have towards med school. Many of them are actually in med school right now. I’m just slightly worried about the future generations of doctors. I don’t want mine to be some bratty rich kid who is just doing this because their parents told them to.

[RagnarOdinson]

Look you've already had people explain to you how your perception of the system doesn't exactly line up with reality, and you've dismissed it as "another adcom- involved person" as if they have any vested interest in lying to you. 

People have explained how it's not about meeting an arbitrary cut off of 1000 hours, doing cookie cutter extra curriculars, but about doing stuff you like (including hobbies like video games), and you dismissed that and questioned how it's related to medicine. Whether you want to accept it or not, people can tell when you do something cause you like it and are passionate about it, and when you do it cause you have to. If that was your mindset when approaching your ECs, I'm not surprised if people caught on to that. 

The system is not perfect, and no one here is claiming that it is. That "rich" privilege you describe is everywhere, not just in medicine, and steps can and should be taken to try to address it. But as long as there are many many more qualified applicants than there are spots, you are going to need some way to differentiate them. Placing much more emphasis on the interview introduces other problems, including inter-interviewer bias, easier gaming of the system since some ppl know questions ahead of time, not to mention you still have to figure out how you decide to give out those interview invites, which inevitably will come back to to GPA, MCAT, ECs. 

And yes whoever said CaRMS is much worse is right on the money. Many more intangible factors, personal bias, random chance, and intense competition. Both systems have their flaws but when you have limited spots it becomes the arms race. 

[carms2tee2tee3]

14 minutes ago, Henry415 said:

Why are you making this about me? I’m not even trying to apply to med school. My rant is the personification of the attitude that many people I actually know have towards med school. Many of them are actually in med school right now. I’m just slightly worried about the future generations of doctors. I don’t want mine to be some bratty rich kid who is just doing this because their parents told them to.

Well then no need to worry cause I can guarantee you that's not the majority of the medicine cohort LOL. I myself come from a low-income background and I would say majority of my classmates are not from affluent backgrounds and even the ones that have rich parents aren't "bratty rich kids". As someone who claims to be a software engineer, you sure seem to care a lot of the med school admin system (BOMBASTIC SIDE EYE ).

Doctors are humans too. At the end of the day, you want someone relatable as a doctor. Anyone can memorize a textbook of knowledge but I think it takes much more to connect to patients. Even if people are forced to volunteer to get it on the ABS for med school admission, they at least get to know the communities they are going to be serving in the future. 

I would disagree with the previous posts that interviews aren't needed. You'd be surprised by some of the psychopathic answers you can get from someone in interviews LOL. I do see it as a good way of screening out red flags but of course a 30 min interview tells you nothing about someone. So maybe just use it to screen out red flag candidates and base everything off paper? IDK Med school admission is of course not fair. But this isn't unique to medicine. It's hard to change the system because at the end of the day, whatever changes you make will make it unfair for some parties compared the other parties. The problem lies in that there's too many applicants for so little spots. In this situation, of course well connected people + richer people will have advantages, like they always do in every field of careers. 

Like others said before, people who think the med school admission system isn't fair, is definitely not prepared for the realities of CaRMS LOOOL. That's like nepotism + connections taken to the extreme.

[Edict]

On 4/12/2023 at 11:11 PM, Henry415 said:

Funny how almost everyone who has responded to me negatively was on the admissions committee at one point in time... You guys seriously can't handle when someone criticizes a system you represent.

Of course the MCAT also favors the economically privileged. Studying for the MCAT also takes significantly less time than dedicating your life to thousands of hours of extracurricular activities across several years. Making the admission weigh the MCAT more and extracurriculars less therefore would narrow the gap between more privileged and less privileged people. Putting more emphasis on the interview process would do the same thing for the same reasons.

Please explain how it's not a waste of an applicant's time to demand that they have so many diverse experiences to show they are a "well rounded" person. Is the profession of medicine really require so many multi-faceted experience in practice? One could reasonably say that volunteering to help those who are marginalized by society develops experience needed to be a doctor because doctors interact with people from diverse backgrounds on a daily basis. I don't think it's reasonable to say that an applicant who has spent 1000 hours volunteering at a homeless shelter is more qualified than someone who has only spent 500 hours. At that point, the hours become a pissing contest about who has the most time to kill.

Admissions committees definitely do not consider ECs in a quantitative way like that, 1000 vs 500. Every applicant is different and viewed in the bigger picture. Someone who can speak to their experience and how it has shaped them has a stronger application than someone who just grinded time away volunteering. ECs are so diverse you can't just compare, but what is probably true is that if you have very few ECs which are less significant, people are less impressed. 

[Edict]

On 4/15/2023 at 12:30 PM, Henry415 said:

Why are you making this about me? I’m not even trying to apply to med school. My rant is the personification of the attitude that many people I actually know have towards med school. Many of them are actually in med school right now. I’m just slightly worried about the future generations of doctors. I don’t want mine to be some bratty rich kid who is just doing this because their parents told them to.

You can be worried but nothing will actually change. We raise kids these days to think they can change the world, but at some point, we all realize that we are just 1 in some 7 billion people and that for most of us, we aren't going to be changing the world, the world's changing us. 

[robclem21]

I think everyone should stop feeding this guy. Obviously a troll.

Not willing to listen to anyone and just being generally disrespectful with responses.

Let him enjoy his fulfilling life as a software engineer and be happy that he is not one of your colleagues you need to consult in the middle of the night.

[zerochance]

2 minutes ago, robclem21 said:

I think everyone should stop feeding this guy. Obviously a troll.

Not willing to listen to anyone and just being generally disrespectful with responses.

Let him enjoy his fulfilling life as a software engineer and be happy that he is not one of your colleagues you need to consult in the middle of the night.

I read through the entire thread and nowhere did he come  across as a troll or disrespectful.

Actually, it is fascinating when people like you immediately try to dismiss another person's  opinion or point of view by immediately labelling them.  This is the world we're living in nowadays where if you dare have a different perspective or take on something then it is equated to being ignorant or trollish...immediately shutdown the conversation rather than engage and hear them out (this is actually your first post in this thread).  

[robclem21]

28 minutes ago, zerochance said:

I read through the entire thread and nowhere did he come  across as a troll or disrespectful.

Actually, it is fascinating when people like you immediately try to dismiss another person's  opinion or point of view by immediately labelling them.  This is the world we're living in nowadays where if you dare have a different perspective or take on something then it is equated to being ignorant or trollish...immediately shutdown the conversation rather than engage and hear them out (this is actually your first post in this thread).  

Never once did I dismiss anyone's perspective of point of view. In fact, I took the time to draft a comprehensive and thoughtful response to his same post that he posted in another thread as well. If you took the time to read that response as well, you would even see that I agreed with a lot of what he had to say. After that response however, there was no acknowledgement of the points I made, or the counter-arguments I presented. He continues to reaffirm his initial points without any thought given to the response presented; a clear indicator he actually has no interest in a discussion or engaging in any meaningful discourse. He is just here to vent his frustration which holds no logical or factual basis.

Others in this same thread have presented personal experiences from both sides of admission, and in a reasonable and respectful way attempted to correct the misconceptions and naive thought process of this former applicant. Again, there is no interest in acknowledging those thoughts or responses. Just a dismissal of anyone else's opinion because we have at one point volunteered our time to serve on admission committees.

Maybe in fact, the problem with the world is not people like me or others here who take the time to try to help applicants who are interested in listening, but people such as the OP who simply want affirmation of their viewpoint without anyone disagreeing. It is equated as ignorant and trollish, not because of the point he is making, but because of ongoing dismissal of everyones responses.

As for just a couple examples of sarcasm and disrespect:

"On another note - hey! It's someone from the admissions committee who is lashing out because a system they represent is being criticized. Who could've known? Do you have any opinions of your own on how the admissions process can be improved? Or are you going to defend it to the death and expect future applicants to be like sheep and adhere to whatever the admission process asks of them without question?"

"I don’t want mine to be some bratty rich kid who is just doing this because their parents told them to."

"Judging by the sheer amount of posts and hundreds of hours you've spent on these forums, you clearly have a lot of time on your hands and I assume you're are more or less of an expert on the subject."

This conversation is not about finding a solution, it's about OP making his vendetta heard and about blaming everyone else but himself for his inability to get accepted to medical school. Try reading more carefully.

[ytho]

1 hour ago, zerochance said:

I read through the entire thread and nowhere did he come  across as a troll or disrespectful.

Actually, it is fascinating when people like you immediately try to dismiss another person's  opinion or point of view by immediately labelling them.  This is the world we're living in nowadays where if you dare have a different perspective or take on something then it is equated to being ignorant or trollish...immediately shutdown the conversation rather than engage and hear them out (this is actually your first post in this thread).  

Kinda funny. You haven't posted in over a year, yet you decide to post on this thread. Post history shows you tried to apply to med ~3 years ago. You're the only person who says they weren't a troll or disrespectful (I mean, if someone calling all med students boring and soulless isn't disrespectful, I question your opinions of others).

Kinda mirroring OP's view that they are right, everyone else is wrong, refusing to accept all criticism.... unless of course... you are OP. But no, there's zerochance you'd be OP because you're not salty and you're too busy rolling in the software developer dough to post on your other account! 

[GH0ST]

2 hours ago, ytho said:

Kinda funny. You haven't posted in over a year, yet you decide to post on this thread. Post history shows you tried to apply to med ~3 years ago. You're the only person who says they weren't a troll or disrespectful (I mean, if someone calling all med students boring and soulless isn't disrespectful, I question your opinions of others).

Kinda mirroring OP's view that they are right, everyone else is wrong, refusing to accept all criticism.... unless of course... you are OP. But no, there's zerochance you'd be OP because you're not salty and you're too busy rolling in the software developer dough to post on your other account! 

 

3 hours ago, zerochance said:

I read through the entire thread and nowhere did he come  across as a troll or disrespectful.

Actually, it is fascinating when people like you immediately try to dismiss another person's  opinion or point of view by immediately labelling them.  This is the world we're living in nowadays where if you dare have a different perspective or take on something then it is equated to being ignorant or trollish...immediately shutdown the conversation rather than engage and hear them out (this is actually your first post in this thread).  

I think the main lessons to take away from other readers should be that...

1) if you make a claim, you should try to provide supporting evidence ... otherwise the point has limited weight

@robclem21 had some good examples shared to support their point. We should all adapt an approach where we do this so we can weigh the evidence more appropriately. 

2) everyone's post should be taken with some grain of salt, especially if there's a track record to suggest potential bias. I think that goes for myself as well. I would also respect those that use evidence to correct my inconsistencies. 

- G