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Doctors 'Cheating' On Board Certifications
Maximum Prophet writes "After taking board exams, doctors have been routinely getting together to remember and reproduce as much of the exam as they can. These notes are then bound and reproduced. According to the American Board of Dermatology, the exams are protected by copyright laws, and any reproduction not approved by the board is illegal. While I have no doubt that the Board believes this, and pays lawyers to believe it as well, I don't think they understand copyright. Perhaps they should invest in better testing methods."
Speaking as an MD, and posting anonymously through more proxy jumps than you can count, I can tell you that the ABR is a disgrace.
They have elected to ELIMINATE the oral exams. Whats next, calling us providers?
Humans are not computer problems, and solving computer questions is not an appropriate screening method for certification.
Bottom line: Oral Examiners should be PAID, CAREFULLY TRAINED, GRADED and only the BEST kept year after year... like NFL REFS !
Of course, the overpaid ABR administration might* have to take a pay cut to achieve this.... AND THEREFORE, THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
A DISGRACE UPON MEDICINE
I thought prohibiting students from sharing past copies of tests was a standard and acceptable method. Is it because they are using copyright to attack the practice?
The American method of 'learning' is mostly rote learning. This does not help. As Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
How shall we as Americans be able to steer our future when what we mostly test is the ability to cram? As a former educator, one of my best times in class was when a student was 'teaching' me. Even when they were wrong, the dialogue enriched both of us and for the student, it was invaluable.
Multiple choice questions make matters worse. No wonder foreign kids beat us in math and science. It's not funny at all.
I had a chance to teach a group of refugees from an African country and it was amazing to see how they approached a problem. While our Americanized kids reached for their calculators, these kids internalized the problem in their heads, then wrote down the range of where they thought the answer would lie, then solved the question. 100% of the time, they were right.
I will ask my doctor what she thinks about this issue when I see her in a fortnight.
The American method of 'learning' is mostly rote learning. This does not help. As Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Really? As a Canadian living in Romania, I have to strongly disagree. The education system here appears to be heavily based on rote learning (much moreso than I saw in Canada or attending American schools in my childhood). The folks I have hired have had excellent imagination, in spite of, not because of, their education (and have generally been the ones who skipped a lot of classes at university and taught themselves the required material).
That said, I previously worked (in Canada) as a physics researcher in a hospital, and we would regularly "joke" about the MDs not being "real doctors" (in contrast to how most people view PhDs), since their main skill appeared to be rote memorization. (See also Richard Feynman's story about his diagram of cat anatomy when he gave a presentation to some med students.) Of couse, as a sibling post says, most medicine comes down to reproducing what is already known (as it should be).
I now look at doctors the way I look at lawyers. To get in, you don't need to be creative (and in fact, you probably shouldn't be, or should suppress it until you've already proven yourself), you just need to know the existing "case law" very very well. Mostly, your job is to identify stuff that has been seen before (taking into account quite a lot of subtle data) and go directly to the most successful known solution. If you want to be imaginative as a doctor, you can go the MD/PhD route (which, in my opinion, makes you a superstar), I suppose, or run the risk of losing your job by doing something no one else has done before (and hence is not "approved").
As a molecular biologist I have to ask: how would that matter? The MDs that have patients don't really need to be thinking about ATPases or the Michaelis–Menten equation. The MDs that are taking basic research and putting it into the field seem to be getting their PhDs which can't be easily faked. And the just regular PhDs are in theory doing the really basic research that involves knowledge of mobio, we don't go to med school or see patients.
Having gotten my Ph.D in the basic research wing of a major medical school, I can concur that MD's typically have only a vague understanding of mechanistic biochemistry, and that the Ph.D's designing future treatments have only a vague understanding of human physiology. Exactly how is this a satisfactory state of affairs?
If you were ill with some condition that presented in an unusual way, (say, a borderline metabolic deficiency), would you prefer your M.D. to actually be able to figure out on their own what's wrong with you, or just blindly follow diagnostic recipes they memorized from the New England Journal of Medicine?
The only reason I can see for wanting a premed student to take molecular biology is to add another level of selection to deter the weakest students from becoming doctors.
You are aware that intro molecular biology is now taught in the second year of any standard biology major, or sometimes combined with biochemistry in your third year? My wife is an ecologist and she took it. Pre-vets take it. Nurses take it in nursing school. Heck, my dentist took advanced biochemistry as well. So why are you against pre-meds taking it? You think a doctor doesn't need to be as capable as a nurse, vet, or dentist? It's not exactly quantum physics, and it's extremely useful since you may only get the abbreviated "molecular medicine" type of crash course in med school since they assume you already took it as a premed.
Interestingly, I've heard that the major that scores the highest on average on the MCAT is actually not premed, biology, or chemistry. Philosophy majors do the best on the MCAT. Granted, there's a lot of self-selection going on there, they probably make up at most 1% of the MCAT takers, and the MCAT is not necessarily an indicator of who will be a good doctor.
You can see a list of the topics covered on the MCAT below which covers (surprise!) molecular/cell biology and biochemistry. Unless the philosophy majors are cheating, they must have at least self-studied the material to score so highly, but more likely than not they took a course or two. I'm really puzzled what you are trying to prove here.
https://www.aamc.org/students/download/85566/data/bstopics.pdf