A problem here is that none of your response deals with the political/ideologic aspect of what’s being added to the MCAT, and creates a series of strawmen about medical care and supposed improvements.
It’s as if we’ve never had public health specialist MDs, recognition of ethnic differences in health or outreach to poorer communities. None of this is remotely new.
Another strawman is the idea that the alternative to making students learn biochemical pathways/chemical formulas is to have them spout buzzwords about institutionalized racism and Sociology 101 concepts. Maybe instead they could spend more time on diagnostic skills, ethical quandaries and how to evaluate the medical literature?
One silver lining here is that an increasing percentage of our physicians in the future will be foreign medical grads. True, they’ll be educated in American residency programs and fellowships, but there will be less opportunity for social indoctrination and more time spent on skills that are actually required to treat patients. And as patients, we’ll be grateful for that.
Why do you keep saying buzzwords? I would imagine they would test for conceptual knowledge, what makes you think otherwise?
Anyhow, it makes sense to me. I remember once going to the doctor for strep - she told me to go back to work. Underlying everything, I felt that she had this opinion that I shouldn’t “baby” myself too much - she came across as very judgmental about laziness.
I ended up going to work and being sick for much longer just because I listened to this stupid doctor with her dumb ideas about having a strong work ethic.
This is not a dumbed down test. It is testing the science to pretty much the same degree as they ever did but have added some other sections - they’ve added the material that would be covered in an intro psychology class and and intro sociology class. Looking it up there is more biochem (NOOOOO!) More on research design and data analysis. It’s about twice as long.
That’s a relief to know. Thank you for clarifying.
What sort of forms or data are we talking about here? Forgive me, but are these the standard demographic forms of yesteryear, with boxes for white, black, Hispanic, etc., a gender box, and maybe a marital status area, or are we talking about a brave new world of complex, multipart forms covering the most intimate details of a person’s life, past, and family history? “Your mother attended Virginia Tech? What was her major and GPA? Did she belong to any sororities? Did she meet your father there? Now please fill out this ten page questionnaire on your attitudes toward disabled people in the community.”
And what will this data be used for? Is this mostly for long-term statistical tracking of heath outcomes or will doctors be expected to scrutinize the data and take specific action based on an individual’s demographic data? For example, if I state that my grandfather was of Irish descent, will that go into a big database somewhere to be data-mined a few years later by grad students looking for thesis data or will that segue into an immediate assessment for alcohol abuse and mandatory attendance at touchy-feely intervention classes intended to teach me how to overcome temptations to coerce my daughter to join a convent?
According to the Kaplan website*, the MCAT powers that be have decided on a rather narrow emphasis on critical thinking skills:
“Verbal Reasoning Is Changing Slightly:
The new section will now be called Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills, or CARS. Unlike the current Verbal Reasoning section, the new CARS section will no longer include passages on the natural sciences; instead, it will focus exclusively on humanities and social sciences passages. This section will now have 53 items, which will need to be completed in 90 minutes. The passages will have 500 – 600 words.”
Apparently, reasoning skills don’t need to be applied to the sciences. :dubious:
Good questions. But we’re going to need lots more data to meet the metrics by which future compensation and success of the new medicine can be gauged. It will need to be readily available electronically to analysts, in (of course) a secure online format.
*the MCAT revamp is a bonanza for one group - professional test preparers. The Kaplan people even offer an “MCAT boot camp”. Yes, I do so envy the new generation of med school applicants.
Actually what it does is go to source material about what is actually in the new MCAT rather than what some individuals say are in it. The new material is not about political/ideologic grandstanding despite the selective quoting of the WSJ. Are the concepts of institutional racism and concepts related to power, privilege and prestige included? Yes, appropriately, along with the rest of a wide variety of concepts that are covered in introductory psychology and sociology classes.
You want those concepts edited out because they offend your political sensibilities?
Future medical students should not know anything about “the structure and patterns of social class, and health disparities in relation to class, race/ethnicity, and gender”? You can cover those subjects without discussing institutional racism, etc., as concepts?
No strawmen and it is not new. These have been important subjects for a long time. What is new is valuing having even some of the basic knowledge of the broad subjects that many other undergraduates finish college with as part of the knowledge that medical students should have.
In point of fact, the new MCAT, as you know if you read my post or actually looked at the concept map, covers critical evaluation of research. Diagnostic skills? That is medical school and residency taught, not undergraduate level material. The chemical formulae are still required too.
The strawman is the one you have created, stuffed with fear of scary “buzzwords” and imagined documentation requirements that have nothing to do with anything regarding this test.
You cannot even be bothered to actually look at the actual AAMC MCAT site which has been spoonfed to you. So much for critical thinking skills I guess.
If you bothered looking at the spoonfed source material you’d see a whole section devoted to “Scientific Inquiry and Reasoning Skills” … data driven more than verbal to be sure, as it should be.
Aimed at requiring more than spitting out memorized facts and instead attempting to evaluate an ability to judge “arguments about cause and effect”, “to use scientific models and observations to draw conclusions”, “to determine and then use scientific formulas to solve problems”.
Yes on test preparers but that those boot camps have been in place for a long time. Heck I took a Stanley Kaplan class over 30 something years ago. This year the anxiety is higher to be sure because no one knows what the test will actually look like and no one knows how med school admissions folk will use it … they can weight the sections as they please, completely ignoring the psych and soc sections if they desire.
Reality IS that medicine is not the same as it was 30 years ago. Having basic fluency in more than aromatic hydrocarbon chemistry and the ilk is now something we need.
So it’s not about ideology, but it is? Um, OK. If the buzzwords ring true to you, then it’s fine, apparently.
Did you notice the Kaplan advisory about critical analysis and reasoning skills as applied to science on the MCAT being eliminated in favor of such skills supposedly being applied to humanities and “social sciences”? That strikes you as an improvement? (not that we can expect much from alleged critical analysis of sociology).
And I’m surprised that we would still have a market for MCAT boot camps if the testers have tossed out memorization in favor of critical reasoning skills. The obvious conclusion is that while testers may have de-emphasized “memorized facts” in science, they’ve mandated memorizing a bunch of social sciences concepts that will need to be regurgitated to score well on the exam.
By uncritically endorsing these “improvements”, DSeid is sounding more and more to me like the guy who insists that every software update is better than what we had before. :dubious:
I could just start off by expressing my shock that any intelligent person actually thinks that the concept of institutional racism is a mere buzzword that does not actually have any basis in reality … the most generous interpretation I could make there is that you must have some faulty understanding of what the concept means. It is merely the term that refers to the societal patterns that are not born of personal intent that have the net result of better or worse outcomes for particular subgroups. These can include things like food deserts in poorer minority predominant areas, lack of insurance coverage tracking with racial grouping, lack of quality physicians in minority urban areas, language barriers, disparities in outcomes for kidney transplants … so on.
But honestly it is not required for you to accept the accuracy of a concept to believe that a concept should be taught. Is non-coding DNA mostly “junk”, or is important functionally? It is an area of some controversy with some on each side. But few would get huffy over junk DNA being discussed as a concept and understanding of what the concept means being tested.
Yes, I think being able to read social science material critically is important for physicians to be able to do. Just as I think being able to critically evaluate a scientific research design and the validity of a study and its posited conclusions, e.g., cause and effect, from its data is important. We need to do be able to critique both. The new MCAT tests both.
The fact that the basics of these skills and concepts have had zero value by the metric of the MCAT has been a huge flaw for many years. If this is a software update it is one that is long overdue. One that I suspect will have some bugs mind you but is a needed start.
Here’s the thing … neither of us use any information about p-orbitals in our practices or needed that information to learn other things in medical school. You do not use any sociology or psychology concepts in your practice. But some of us do, and not just public health specialists and those working with predominantly poor and underserved populations. I am full time in my office which is majority fee for service, but I also serve as Pediatric department chair for our physician owned very large multi-specialty group practice and serve on our Quality Improvement Committee as well. Group dynamics, the development of culture, social norms, barriers to patient compliance, and so on, are a large part of that part of my medical existence and attempting to motivate changes in behavior is a large part of my day in and day out job. I wish I had a better sociologic understanding of why so many glom on to woo and how to effectively combat it, because those factors are a large part of why certain subgroups behave how they do … for example. One of my partners has been over his career instrumental at a state level at dealing with pediatric Medicaid issues, and had been instrumental is improving access to care; structural barriers to effective care delivery was and is a major item to deal with. The material of just basic sociology and psychology classes being included as on the same level of importance as p-orbitals and aromatic hydrocarbon chemistry is material that we use and needed to know to learn more advanced concepts. Yes, I know you do not.
Insufficient "quality’ physicians practicing in poorer areas is “institutionalized racism”? Who knew?
In any case, I am thankful that there is at least one lone voice in the wilderness fighting against those who would confine testing of prospective med students to benzene rings and p-orbitals, bravely knocking down strawmen and creating a bonfire from their remains.
I think you probably know “Reasoning skills not need to be applied to the sciences” isn’t an honest paraphrase of… well, anyone. And you’re the one complaining about strawmen?
The change to the VR/CARS section was based on the AAMC’s determination that the natural science passages in verbal reasoning didn’t provide a sufficient distinction for test takers from the passages in the science sections to justify prepping test takers on two different approaches to science passages. Specifically, the VR section’s science passages were subject to the VR rules that the answers are already in the passage, whereas the science sections’ passages explicitly required outside knowledge to answer the questions. This was one of the areas where good students lost a lot of points, and the AAMC decided there wasn’t enough benefit from including the natsci passages to justify keeping them.
The fact that the new CARS section is explicitly focused on critical thinking does not mean that the rest of the exam doesn’t require those skills, and if you’d bothered to do any research at all on the new exam you’d know that it’s been designed to emphasize, rather than de-emphasize, those skills.
Good points, thanks. Education is also becoming recognized as an important factor in health - it’s become known as “health literacy”. Here’s a peer-reviewed paper to get you started. It’s been shown that people with less education are more likely to be in poorer health. There is probably still some room to debate the causation (e.g. whether being stupid makes you sick, whether being sick makes you stupid, or whether a third factor makes you both sick and stupid), but one easy way to test that is to find uneducated sick people, educate them, and then see if their health improves. Can you find any research on that?
Yes, thanks, I did notice that. I decided to leave it as a sort of poetic shorthand. Anyway, yes, “ignorance” is probably a better word. But you have to admit it sounds more catchy and memorable the way I said it.
Nope, I didn’t take Intro Soc. I did train at a time when med schools actively discouraged students from practicing in underserved areas.
Wait, it was actually the opposite. Even more than 20 years ago, my med school preferentially took applicants who seemed to have the best chance of going into primary care in rural or minority underserved communities, and promoted these opportunities highly. And there are even more programs now to help promote/finance startup practices in these areas.
But I suppose it’s easier to look at graduates’ inclinations to seek optimal economic opportunities as they whittle down massive school debt, and label that “institutionalized racism”.
I think it’s fine for med schools to seriously consider candidates outside the traditional science/premed majors, and take some sociology or humanities majors, as long as they have solid academic records including sufficient science prerequisites. You believe in what your sociology profs told you and are out to revolutionize medical care? Go for it.
Just don’t funnel every potential candidate through an introductory sociology course and expect anything more than the usual trained seals accepting fish treats for memorizing keywords.
But of course, the only alternative is accepting physician candidates based on whether they know what a zwitterion is.
“Easier”? Nah. But accurate. Your difficulty seems to be a persistent misunderstanding about what the term means. It explicitly does not mean any racist intent with nevertheless a racist effect as a result of structural/institutional factors. Indeed the fact that medical students are graduating with huge debt loads and consequently are more likely to weight higher compensation, especially in an era of declining physician compensation in general, as more important has disparate impact on health care for minorities. It also distorts towards specialties and consequently to greater health care costs … but that is a different discussion. For this discussion, yes, that is a very good example of a factor that contributes to what sociologists refer to as “institutional racism” and anyone who did not retain that concept and who cannot apply it did a poor job learning in an intro soc class.
Good, we have agreement. And really that is all that changing the hoops to include some basic psych and soc knowledge accomplishes.
Actually never took a soc class myself. But I am not making my point clear to you: the revolution is in progress. If you have managed to stay in exactly the same sort of practice over the years without adapting to these changes more power to you, but there are fewer and fewer of you left. Physicians who cannot function well as part of coordinated teams able to collect the evidence that we are providing value at population levels will find themselves unable to make enough to pay their staff. I am of the belief that doctors should still be leaders in these systems, and preferably owners, and should possess the skills and tools to do that.
Here is some really interesting (to me) data that is very relevent to the discussion; it seems to support a lot of what Dseid is saying in a perhaps roundabout way, and refutes a lot of the ideas Jackmanii has about the ability of those focused on the hard sciences to pass to score better on the old MCAT.
