I am a medical student, and I have taken the MCAT. It is not just a memorization test. Each section is made up of a series of excerpts from scientific papers and questions that relate to that article. It requires you to synthesize the new information from an article with your knowledge of chemistry, biology, etc. to come to the correct answer. From what I understand, the USMLE exams are similar. It is important to score well on the MCAT because medical schools want student who are able to read scientific papers and apply their findings. Medical schools also look beyond just MCAT score and grades when selecting students.

I can relate to this experience (US medical student). Medical school is not only about being able to memorize literally everything possible, but also applying that knowledge in situations that may not fit the "perfect" picture. It's the ultimate test of memory, application, and communication (because when you find the right answer, you also have to be able to explain it to your patient).

My childhood dentist is the best craftsman that I know. Can carve stuff in wood, make jewelry, any part of fixing up a house.

If we or his kids ever got any wounds that needed stitching he would do it instead of the hospital as we knew he would do a better job.

Steven Zeitels is one of the best vocal surgeons in the world -- he's operated on Adele, Roger Daltrey and others. Prior to becoming a physician, he did leather work, selling his creations on the street and that appears to have allowed him to develop unrivaled manual skills [0]:

Zeitels succeeded in part because of his leatherwork in college: It made him ambidextrous, a necessary skill for a procedure in which a cut a millimeter too deep would damage the vocal cords, but where one too shallow would leave some of the lesion intact, and therefore able to grow back. The problem with Zeitels’s surgery, however, was that no one else could repeat it. No one else in the field could be as precise. As he looked to publish his findings in an atlas on the larynx, one editor told him, “You can’t write that! People can’t do that!” His findings were published anyway, but the editor was right.

[0] https://www.bostonmagazine.com/2008/09/22/voicebox-hero/

They are selecting for people who are book smart, because most professionals engage in a system where memorization is a key component of the field. Engineering, law and other professions work similarly, to some extent. It's not necessarily wrong, I want my doctor to have a thorough knowledge of their subject area and be able to have the mental capacity in the right places.

But surely, we can be selecting for people who are better rounded as opposed to human robots. You actually see the same thing in engineering interviews. Regurgitating leetcode answers etc but ask them a question that's not exactly what they studied for and it all falls apart.

As you said:

> being selected for their memorization skills, not for critical thinking

The argument is that memorization is the leading metric to learning. If critical thinking - which is what counters indoctrination - is the leading metric, then things are learned much more deeply than merely remembering information in contextual silos, devoid of interconnectivity that critical thinking allows and builds for.

A physician's "subject area" is "all" areas, and they too will refer to Google or other resources to confirm to themselves - similarly with medical advertising rampant in the US, it's often the patients who put ideas into the doctors' minds. Do they need 12 years of schooling to "know" everything - which will likely be outdated knowledge by the time they learn it? Or should we be training people to become experts at navigating systems of learning and specifics protocols to follow, so they are efficient and fluid?

Specialization is valuable for many reasons, though we don't seem to leverage or engage with that properly, yet.