The one who is the best surgeon which could be any of them judging from my experience from other jobs. All the best programmers I know did well in school and on tests, but beyond a certain point test scores mean very little and other factors not measured by tests matter more.

I would not want a doctor who did poorly on tests, but a doctor who is great at tests vs one who is top in the country probably does not matter.

Do people who do better on standardized tests make better doctors? I take the null hypothesis. One's grades and test scores in high school are poor predictors of one's professional efficacy after a certain point.

I say, eliminate obvious cases of students who aren't trying, take the handful of obviously excellent students, and for every applicant in between, have a lottery.

> If you have an Asian Medical Doctor, they are AAA. If you have a multiple minority Medical Doctor, they are not necessarily AAA, they could be As.

> Which one do you want to do brain surgery on you?

I have no strong opinion on affirmative action but this is a dishonest way to frame this topic.

Affirmative action doesn't mean an institution can produce unqualified doctors. Both doctors should've gone through same examinations at medical schools, studied same textbooks and have similar training.

Taking the same texts and having the same books mean nothing since the point of tests is the grades so what matters is if they had the same grades or not

Look at grade averages for med schools over time.

Also if the school is willing to bend their standards on admissions, who’s to say they won’t bend their standards on grading? It’s also almost impossible to get fired from a residency program once you get in, graduation rates are near 95%…

I already don’t trust MD’s compared to DO’s because MD schools nearly all got rid of grading and all classes are pass/fail which encourages doing just well enough to pass. DO schools meanwhile continue to grade students which encourages excellence.

> who’s to say they won’t bend their standards on grading?

Schools that do this will lose their accreditation.

Schools that _don't_ do this will lose accreditation soon.

Wishful thinking. The Physician club is one of back scratching, not critical evaluation.

The Physician->AMA->ACGME->Physician pipe benefits everyone involved.

What's the worst thing that could happen? Malpractice lawsuits have doctors win 50% of the time when there is strong evidence, and 90% of the time when there is weak evidence.

The rich created a cartel and the feedback loop is already here.

IIRC some med schools are getting rid of grades in favor of pass/fail. This makes it hard to tell which students are great and which ones barely passed.

I just saw the stats from a medical school— I believe it was UCSF but correct me if I’m wrong— where the average Asian reject had higher scores than the average Black/Hispanic accepted applicant

> I just saw the stats from a medical school— I believe it was UCSF but correct me if I’m wrong—

Given that affirmative action was banned at UC schools in 1996, I suspect that you're mistaken about at least the school in question.

Which, it should be noted, means that we've accrued ~25 years of data about the results of such a ban. And the answer is that it's bad: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-31/californ...

Affirmative action was banned across California and the article you cited itself says that the problem is only with UCs and not CSUs. The reasons proposed (distance, costs, number of UCs vs CSUs) intuitively ring true to me. Today's decision is obviously correct from a legal standpoint (equal protection clause bans all race-based discrimination) but the difference between CSUs and UCs actually suggests a positive path forward for helping boost Black and Latino enrollment in UCs- step one might be building a lot more and making them cheaper.

An asian applicant scoring 25 on the MCAT has a 6% acceptance rate.

A black applicant scoring 25 on the MCAT has a 56% acceptance rate.

As a medical school dropout, scoring 33S... I had a hard time accepting this.

It's important to remember that if the average Asian score is higher than the average Hispanic score, then the average Asian accepted will statistically have a higher score than the average Hispanic accepted, even without discrimination.

UPenn Med School lets in minorities through a side door, no MCAT required. [1]

This will increase discrimination against minority doctors. It most hurts the ones who could have gotten in through the front door but will be assumed not to have.

1: https://dailycaller.com/2022/08/26/some-underrepresented-stu...