The Much-Disliked Medical School Admissions Test gets an Overhaul

Have you ever spoken to a young person who’s hopeful of becoming a qualified doctor? Usually, they speak in glowing terms about all they hope to achieve in life in the medical profession and how well they have been doing at preparing for med school one day. When the conversation comes around to preparation for the Medical College Admission test or the MCATs, you will usually catch a sharp drop in the kind of enthusiasm say feel. What is it about the medical school admissions test that doctor hopefuls dislike so much?

The medical school admissions test is a standardized exam that requires a great deal of mastery of the pre-medical curriculum area. Usually, young people hopeful of a place in med school don't just study hard to merit a seat. They sign up for a great deal of extracurricular work. They work as an assistant to a doctor, volunteer at hospitals, and so on. The kind of requirements that medical school admissions tests place on them, they usually have to give up all kinds of extracurricular work and devote themselves entirely to studying their physics, chemistry and biology texts. This becomes a point of contention. They feel that the whole admissions process has its focus on the wrong priorities. How sensible can it be to require a potential doctor to give up working to help people so that they can study? Isn't it an ability to care for people that makes a good doctor?

The MCAT is a test they call the SATs for doctor hopefuls. It's been around for about 80 years now. Back then, the test was all about making sure that an applicant for med school was always someone who was really interested in medicine. They had a lot of trouble back then with people applying for med school, and then realizing halfway on that they weren't interested in medicine after all. The test has really been successful; of the 20,000 med school students taken on each year, only a handful quit.

While the med school admissions test might be successful at separating the truly serious medical students from the non-serious, it does absolutely nothing to predict what candidate actually cares about people or who is ethically superior. For this reason, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the body that administers the test is about to make a major change to the way the MCAT is run. They want to test students now for their personal philosophies, their ethics and their sense of fairness.

Some people are worried about the wisdom of tampering with a successful formula. They feel that whether or not someone wants to help people isn't important. That's a quality that's in abundance in the general population. People who just love to help people are almost never in a position to do that. Helping people comes from having the power to help people; it doesn't come from a mere willingness to do it. Still, they're going through with the change. The new MCAT will run in a couple of years.