Apr 4, 2024 03:48 AM
https://tomklingenstein.com/the-end-of-m...be-deadly/
INTRO: America is at war. This is not a traditional war, fought on a battlefield against an external enemy. It is a civilizational conflict against an internal enemy: the group quota regime, a revolutionary threat that seeks to reorganize American society around the principle of outcome equality — what the regime’s partisans call “equity.”
This cold civil war may go unnoticed by many day-to-day, but its stakes are often as high as life and death. Here, Roger B. Cohen, a celebrated oncologist and professor in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, explains how the group quota regime has taken hold of the American medical education system and asks urgent questions about the consequences for medicine, for the sick, and for the country.
EXCERPT: . . . The medical profession’s leaders, almost without exception or dissent, now vigorously enforce this new orthodoxy of anti-racism. Most notably, they have designed and implemented a new version of medical education explicitly grounded in ideology rather than scientific excellence. In pursuit of this project, the president of the AAMC (which accredits U.S. medical schools) and the chair of the AAMC’s Council of [Medical School] Deans stated publicly in July 2022: “We believe this topic [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] deserves just as much attention from learners and educators at every stage of their careers as the latest scientific breakthroughs.”
The AAMC’s DEI Competencies, issued in October 2021, details the new required social justice skills that medical students must acquire. In addition, the AAMC has discouraged the use of the rigorous Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) as a filter to help select medical students. Dozens of the 158 allopathic (MD granting) U.S. medical schools have made the MCAT optional. Several medical schools, including the prestigious University of Pennsylvania, have programs to admit students from designated “underrepresented” identity groups without requiring the submission of MCAT scores at all.
The MCAT itself has been revised to include social justice questions that are easy to ace because the answers are always the same: structural racism is the cause of any group disparities that disfavor underrepresented groups. But even this re-engineered test shows persistent group disparities in test scores, which means that Asian applicants must score almost 4 times higher than black applicants to have an equal chance of admission.
Large discrepancies in qualifications, which endure despite strenuous efforts to dumb down the MCAT, have spawned the euphemistic practice of “holistic review” of medical school applicants, “a process that considers each applicant individually by balancing their academic metrics with experiences and attributes.” The search for a so-called “new excellence” in how medical applicants are chosen places diversity, equity, and inclusion at its core; reduces reliance on demonstrated scientific knowledge and proficiency; and emphasizes applicants’ “attitudes, values, and experiences.” Under holistic review, “it’s the journey, not the destination” that counts.
This reckless demolition of longstanding standards now extends to medical licensing exams. In an effort to reduce purported “racial bias” against self-identified black, Asian, and Hispanic examinees who score lower than self-identified whites, the Step 1 federal licensing exam, taken at the end of the second year of medical school, is now pass/fail and no longer numerically graded. This change works to the disadvantage of graduates of foreign and lower-ranked U.S. medical schools who rely on their performance on that exam to demonstrate excellence and their future potential as physicians.
Medical academia’s efforts to deemphasize testing and reduce the importance of exam-based proficiency comes at a time when other institutions are moving in the opposite direction... (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: America is at war. This is not a traditional war, fought on a battlefield against an external enemy. It is a civilizational conflict against an internal enemy: the group quota regime, a revolutionary threat that seeks to reorganize American society around the principle of outcome equality — what the regime’s partisans call “equity.”
This cold civil war may go unnoticed by many day-to-day, but its stakes are often as high as life and death. Here, Roger B. Cohen, a celebrated oncologist and professor in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, explains how the group quota regime has taken hold of the American medical education system and asks urgent questions about the consequences for medicine, for the sick, and for the country.
EXCERPT: . . . The medical profession’s leaders, almost without exception or dissent, now vigorously enforce this new orthodoxy of anti-racism. Most notably, they have designed and implemented a new version of medical education explicitly grounded in ideology rather than scientific excellence. In pursuit of this project, the president of the AAMC (which accredits U.S. medical schools) and the chair of the AAMC’s Council of [Medical School] Deans stated publicly in July 2022: “We believe this topic [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] deserves just as much attention from learners and educators at every stage of their careers as the latest scientific breakthroughs.”
The AAMC’s DEI Competencies, issued in October 2021, details the new required social justice skills that medical students must acquire. In addition, the AAMC has discouraged the use of the rigorous Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) as a filter to help select medical students. Dozens of the 158 allopathic (MD granting) U.S. medical schools have made the MCAT optional. Several medical schools, including the prestigious University of Pennsylvania, have programs to admit students from designated “underrepresented” identity groups without requiring the submission of MCAT scores at all.
The MCAT itself has been revised to include social justice questions that are easy to ace because the answers are always the same: structural racism is the cause of any group disparities that disfavor underrepresented groups. But even this re-engineered test shows persistent group disparities in test scores, which means that Asian applicants must score almost 4 times higher than black applicants to have an equal chance of admission.
Large discrepancies in qualifications, which endure despite strenuous efforts to dumb down the MCAT, have spawned the euphemistic practice of “holistic review” of medical school applicants, “a process that considers each applicant individually by balancing their academic metrics with experiences and attributes.” The search for a so-called “new excellence” in how medical applicants are chosen places diversity, equity, and inclusion at its core; reduces reliance on demonstrated scientific knowledge and proficiency; and emphasizes applicants’ “attitudes, values, and experiences.” Under holistic review, “it’s the journey, not the destination” that counts.
This reckless demolition of longstanding standards now extends to medical licensing exams. In an effort to reduce purported “racial bias” against self-identified black, Asian, and Hispanic examinees who score lower than self-identified whites, the Step 1 federal licensing exam, taken at the end of the second year of medical school, is now pass/fail and no longer numerically graded. This change works to the disadvantage of graduates of foreign and lower-ranked U.S. medical schools who rely on their performance on that exam to demonstrate excellence and their future potential as physicians.
Medical academia’s efforts to deemphasize testing and reduce the importance of exam-based proficiency comes at a time when other institutions are moving in the opposite direction... (MORE - missing details)