People who are feeling insecure or disappointed over being at the bottom should remember these two things:
Ranks don’t matter as much as where a data point falls on the distribution. Is it within two standard deviations of the mean? If it is, no worries. But concern may be warranted if you’re a true outlier. A simple rank doesn’t tell you this, though.
Also, while a single instance of being at the “bottom” shouldn’t throw up any red flags, a consistent pattern of being at the bottom does indicate something. That something could mean incompetence, or it could suggest a person who eschews competition and operates on their own rules. The former is bad, but the latter is a positive trait.
That said, I think it’s crazy to say being at the bottom never matters, or that it shouldn’t matter. You don’t have to be a competitive person to not want to come in last.
Let’s fill a room with people who graduated first in their class. In fact, let’s take them all from the same school and the same discipline, but they were first in different years. By whatever means of ranking you develop, one of those people will be last. So, what does that mean?
On the other hand, eons ago when I got my first engineering job, one of my coworkers told me he struggled to graduate with his mechanical engineering degree. I don’t recall which university, but it was fairly well-known. No matter - he was one of the best engineers I’d ever worked with. He was a natural problem-solver and meticulous in his work. His rough sketches were better than some finished drawings by other engineers. That certainly showed me that class rank doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
Well I deliberately wrote it as “1rst” instead of “first” because I thought having numbers would have a better visual impact. It’s probably more commonly written as “1st”. though.
Something similar - years ago I was asked to judge high school debate.
Now some of the debates it was quite obvious that team #1 beat out team #2 by say a 90%-50% score.
But others who were in the upper levels, oh man. They were so darn close! If I was giving them a grade it would be a difference between a 98% and a 99%. Which was frustrating because one of those teams had to win.
I dropped out of judging after this because I didnt feel competent judging such high caliber debaters at those close levels.
The issue of getting a high rank compared to others versus meeting some standard is a big one. In the world of academic evaluation there’s a difference between the Norm-referenced test where you are being compared with others (e.g. average, far below average, just above average, etc.), and a Criterion-based one where you are being evaluated as to what level of achievement or knowledge you have demonstrated. Many of these are so-called “mastery” assessments where one either passes or fails. Either you have mastered enough material and are qualified to be a doctor, or else you have not mastered enough of the material and have to go back and study more. It doesn’t matter in that case how much better you are than the cutoff level - what matters is that you met the requirement.
I think that sometimes when people raise the idea of “last in their class” or similar thoughts, there is an implication that they really mean “incompetent”. But as previously mentioned and as virtually everyone reading this knows through experience, there are basic requirements that everyone has to meet to get through. If you try to seat-surf your way through college, not studying and not turning in any papers, you don’t graduate last in your class. You fail. The guy who graduated dead last in his class with an almost-failing 2.001 GPA? He demonstrated that he met the requirements for a degree. If your standard of competency is a 3.8 GPA or above, fine, make 3.8 the requirement for graduation. Otherwise, give people a break and acknowledge their accomplishments.
That’s not so far off from what one doctor at a medical school told me when I asked him the above question. He told me that they graduate the doctors and all of them have to pass a certain criteria.
So every person who graduates from the University of Kansas medical school is a qualified physician.
But, he said that after them passing they go do their residencies and their is when they truly get tested and where the good and bad doctors are weeded out. Or many of them find they are not suited for certain types of medicine like say ER and might go to a less stressful area like say research.
I was one of three judging a chili cook off years ago. Thirty chilies entered. On our first tasting, we easily agreed on 20 that didn’t measure up. With ten left we all agreed on the top five, then the top three. But damn, it was tough ordering first, second, and third.
Can one actually “fail” a medical residency in the same way as one might fail a course? I thought residencies were basically internships - do residents have regular exams and papers with a required minimum GPA to stay in the program? Do doctors get graded on the procedures they do and the decisions they make on the floor? E.g. “Resident Jones, you diagnosed Ms. Spickle with a chromodermal narcoticism. I agree that she does have a chromodermal narcoticism, but you should have run a transcranial stroop test to confirm the absence of a hemisphericalism before sending the patient to a hydrodynamic specialist. C-.”
There is an element of regionality at play though. Harvard is Harvard, and is one of a handful of schools that carries that sort of cache…but in Podunk, Podunk U may be well respected, and first in your class there might be meaningful - and seen as far superior to South Podunk U. Show up in Boston with your law degree from Podunk U and it may not mean much, though.
Harvard pretty much gives out A’s for showing up to class; if you really screw up you get an A-. At least that’s what I’ve been told. Of course the hard part is getting in.
Nuther fun fact; Wharton doesn’t release grade point average until 6 months after graduation - they want the students to not be too competitive with each other. (Or so I have been told)
The difference between first and last in an undergraduate class will be huge. The difference between first and last in a Masters program will still be large, though significantly less so. By the time you get to the difference between first and last in a medical specialty such as Heart Lung Transplant surgeon, the difference will be insignificant. Anybody who has earned the right to that title is fully qualified.
Western Governors’ University does, or did the last time I checked, track students solely on whether they pass or fail each requirement. E.g. either you demonstrated sufficient essay writing skills to complete the Freshman Composition requirement or you did not demonstrate sufficient writing skills to pass it, try again later. They don’t bother quantitatively evaluating how much better you were than the benchmark. If your writing skills are really that m4d 1337, you can go further in the program without having to try as hard, or you could go for further qualifications that are more at your level of competency. If your writing skills suck balls, you’d better be staying up late every night improving them.
Not to be contradictory but there is a HUGE difference in competency levels for many advanced medical procedures - I don’t even think it is a point worth debating.
Yes, absolutely. There are specialty specific exams every year or 6 months, as well as the requirement to pass the remaining parts of the US medical licensing exams not completed in medical school. Equally important are evaluations by supervising doctors where you are graded on a large range of criteria. You generally aren’t graded on individual clinical decisions as in your example, but they do contribute to the big picture.