I don't see anybody here describing the MCAT as an "arbitrary hurdle." If you reread what you quoted from my post, I was being critical of the past traditional approach of relying solely (or nearly so) on MCAT scores and GPA.
Clearly, physicians are scientists who need to be able to operate at a high level and deal with whatever stresses are implicit in the job. But don't mistake "ER" for life as every physician. Across most of the profession, practicing medicine is about relationships with the patient. (No, I'm not talking about Oprah-style chitchat and feeling everybody's pain.) Even the cardiac surgeon who needs to make quick, accurate calculations about cardiac output at a moment's notice needs to relate to patients when making decisions leading up to the surgery and rehabbing afterwards. In the emergency department, many of the patients are unconscious when they come in... otherwise, a physician's ability to relate to people directly affects their ability to put their training, intelligence, an mental-calculating abilities to best use.
I don't question that MCAT has a valuable place in the process. But MCAT performance is not real life as a physician. It gives medical schools an opportunity to learn something about your character, your determination, your ability, and to a lesser extent your knowledge. But as someone who was trained as an educator, I can tell you that standardized testing is often less about how good you are at the subject matter than how good you are at the test. As it turns out, I'm really good at standardized tests and have a high GPA. I did great on the MCAT. Yay for me,
but med schools are beginning to understand that won't necessarily make me a good physician.
Don't get me wrong... MCAT scores are highly predictive--but not of medical school "success" (whatever that is). Doing well on the MCAT indicates that you'll do well at other tests... USMLEs. Obviously, that's necessary if you want to be a doctor, but great USMLE scores also don't make somebody a great doctor. If you or I or anybody can figure out how to predict that, there's a Nobel prize coming our way.
I have respect for the process, including the MCAT. But I think that the most significant things that schools can learn from the scores are:
- So you think you want to be a doctor. Do you really mean it?
- No, really. Do you mean it?
- Can you hack the kind of hard work it's going to take? Here's a sample.
- I really have to ask again... you sure you mean it?
These are very important things to find out for somebody entrusted with the medical care of other human beings, often under demanding circumstances. A classic "good" example to answer those questions might be the person who took the exam once and scored 41T. But those questions may also be answered equally well by someone who has taken the exam more than once and picked up five points. Do you really mean it? Oh, yeah, I mean it... and I can back it up with hard work, too.
I don't dismiss the MCAT as an arbitrary hurdle, but I think that schools are getting better at placing those scores in the overall context of what makes a person a potential physician. Good for them... and for us... and for everybody who will ever need a doctor.
