This is the state of America today. The right generally has a point, even if not perfectly articulated or well researched. And the left is WAY over the line and covers it up, protects and doubles down on bad policy, and gets their base fired up instead of being introspective. Politics over policies. Unlike the G W Bush era, the left is far more scary and deranged than the right these days
The fact that you don't realize the right implements the same exact methodology (and I would argue, much more often than the left) you just described shows your lack of being introspective. The right is literally trying to steal elections and you find the left more scary? C'mon, guy!
Obviously everyone has their own biases, risk assessments and priorities, but yeah, trying to sell the right as more reasonable, less crazy and less risky in the era of Trump and MAGA is kind of funny. The truth is that both sides have given a lot of ammunition to the other side.
It's reasonable to attack the left for affirmative action, DIE, pro-crime prosecutors, and weak-on-crime legislation, but the right has plenty of its own madness. Also, while Democrats are now voting out pro-crime prosecutors and voting for tough-on-crime legislation, the same kind of backlash doesn't seem to be happening on the right.
Let's look at some examples. In the Bush era, people rightly attacked the right for denying climate change; nowadays, not only do they maintain that position, but they have also added the anti-vax movement and all sorts of anti-science and conspiracy lunacy to their repertoire. In the Bush era, people were worried about the religious right, well, now they have managed to reverse Roe vs Wade and red states continue to ban abortion and medical treatment for women, even when the majority of people in those states are against such extremist bans. And let's not forget that the right now has a serious difficulty accepting elections that they lose, and the guy who is going to be the Republican presidential candidate literally tried to steal an election that he lost.
Vinay, I have much of the data to which you refer from two different medical schools (where I sit on/interact with the admissions committee). I have the correlation between "admitted because URM" and failing and it is over 0.7. The remediators in virtually every block are almost all URMs.
No one (especially in committee) will discuss this, but it is well understood. The keepers of this horribleness are those in charge, sadly. They will brook not a word against the narrative.
The premise, as idiotic as it is, is that Indian doctors do better at taking care of Indians, black doctors do better at taking care of blacks, etc. It is 100% wrong. I have yet to meet a doctor who really cared what the race of their patient was (yes, there is probably one somewhere, but not the point); the good doctors do the best for whoever is sitting on the exam table. EVERY race needs the best doctor...not the one that looks like them. Thinking otherwise is both demeaning and stupid and is characteristic of AWFUL people (like the UCLA admissions dean) and their male acolytes.
You could/should gather this information from UCSF. Maybe we could pool numbers and see how prevalent this all is. But everywhere I have looked, the results are the same.
I feel like I am being gaslit on this issue. it's really not that complicated. if you lower admissions standards you get poorer results. The people that want to argue endlessly about the data are lacking in the most basic of common sense. Im sorry but I'm not going to UCLA teaching hospital if I have any medical issues. My health is more important than blind fealty to a leftist religious idealogy I have never signed up for. UCLA obviously knows this is true, which is exactly why they could release this data but simply won't. it would be the easiest thing in the world to disprove the reporting. But they can't. because it's obviously true.
Hey Mathew, since you are presumably more intelligent than the average URM student, can you do me a favor and explain how a rising GPA and MCAT average over the last 4 years means that standards have been LOWERED?
Please explain, because right now it seems evident that physicians are sticking their heads in the sand in order to peddle racist narratives. And that is wildly unbecoming.
Rising averages, alone, tell us nothing about how data is distributed. When you visualize medical school class statistics, they are typically multimodal distributions with each mode representing a racial group (MCAT on the x-axis and number of students on the y-axis.)
As we continue to relax objective admissions requirements for URM applicants, we are also seeing increased standards for non-URM applicants. In other words, the average of the entire class rises while the average for URM admits within that class falls.
This is because there are more non-URM students than there are URM students in any given class. Thus, an increase in the average for non-URM students affects the total class average more than a decrease in the average for URM students.
Hey Fred the reporting made it clear the GPA for the students in question had lower GPAs than average. I am deeply deeply sorry that these facts are inconvenient for you and I'm sorry that the only way you want to choose to have a discussion is by first throwing out ugly race baiting in your first line. I can't help but notice you are attacking me for reasons I don't understand and not the OP in this thread who says he has the data and confirms much of the story
The reality is that (Black, Indian, Chinese, Latino…pick your ethnic/cultural background and self-affiliation) ALL have a bias towards positively assessing their communities representation amongst trainees.
Overseeing it all is largely a Jewish (mixed nationality) cultural identity., at the administrative level.
This is a fact at administrative executive levels at UCLA (and perhaps at UC in general), and I believe that’s one of the key reasons why redirecting the causes/effect from the problem at hand (the placement of subpar doctors in the LA and broader California community), and to label it as a student and trainee diversity problem and not an administrative selection problem is in place.
Frankly, having worked with the Dean at UCLA for 2 decades, I can declare that his personal viewpoint is actually quite in line with the Journalist from the conservative news site.
If he could have it his way, he would fill his classes with largely (subservient) top of the line minorities (pick your color), provided he got to embed preordained Jewish physician-scientists and administrative leaders to lead them into the next generation.
And in this venture, he actually has Bruin “shareholder” support.
Accordingly, I don’t believe he really cares what happens to the University’s reputation or the caliber of new doctors put out in the short term.
What’s KEY is that control over ucla-administrative processes is maintained as it currently is over the long haul, at one of the largest employers and land grant public institutions in the United States.
Would you be willing to share your data? I am doing a project involving compromised standards and its relationship, if any, to URM status. thanks so much. Feel free to email me at slsatel@gmail.com (Sally Satel MD) Thank you very much.
I'm a big fan of Vinay's but the criticism of the free beacon article is what ~actually~ seems lazy here. The free beacon article is working off of information directly leaked from members of the UCLA admissions committee and their professors. This is entirely unheard of in medical admissions--for your own faculty (on the admissions committee!) to leak your embarassing data to the press in order to share that they're so concerned with what's happening at their school they WANT their school to be embarrassed. Saying "oh but they posted their story without 1 to 1 data of how the URM students inappropriately accepted into the school performed on their exams" (data which no journalist would get access to ever) is an impossible standard. Moreover, saying that this story was anywhere below the standards of modern journalism is...laughable. This story had more access to data than any other similar story and provided an unprecedented view behind the scenes of this admissions committee.
As for proving that DEI admissions are problematic and were at play here...you read direct language from members of the admissions committee that students were admitted into the school with GPA and test scores far below the average specifically because of their race ("we need students like this here", "we have enough of HIS KIND") and the school's test scores went down. That's not a huge leap. They also made their curriculum worse by cutting out a bunch of preclinical time and wasting student time on mandatory DEI classes. Not a leap at all to say both are likely responsible.
None of that even addresses how this is very likely both unconstitutional on a federal level and directly violates california law. Embarrassing story all around for UCLA and this free beacon article was an important look into what has been destroying this school and much of medical education.
This! This is why I read comments. As a former journalist, I can say for sure that the data that would prove the Beacon's point will never ever be disclosed to a journalist.
Look, we are both medical students and have an intimate understanding of med school. Vinay's points stand, and the Free Beacon article doesn't entertain two other factors at play in the failure data, and neither do you.
1. The curriculum at UCLA underwent a significant shift to a 1-year preclinical curriculum. This change implies that students may not be adequately prepared for the clerkships, as they might not have been exposed to key topics observed on the wards. This could be a significant contributing factor to increased failures.
2. Many of these students were impacted by COVID and Zoom school. The Zoom schooling could also have led to a subpar learning environment and made the students ill-prepared for their clerkships.
So, it's evident that the Free Beacon article needs to be more thorough. While it's true that this journalist may never obtain race-disaggregated data, it's equally true that he fails to consider these other crucial factors. A drop in admissions standards could also influence the failure rate, but it's ironic when many doctors today claim they wouldn't have been accepted into medical school with the current standards. Comments like these suggest that the admissions standards are significantly higher than in the past for older doctors, the age group of doctors supporters of this analysis supposedly only trust now.
Truly no disrespect, but either you did not read the Free Beacon story or my comment fully, or your bias has erased it from your memory. Both the Free Beacon article and my initial comment directly mention your point 1. From the Free Beacon story:
"The collapse in qualifications has been compounded by UCLA's decision, in 2020, to condense its preclinical curriculum from two years to one...That means students arrive at their clinical rotations with just a year of courses under their belt—some of which focus less on science than social justice. First-year students spend three to four hours every other week in "Structural Racism and Health Equity," a required class that covers topics like "fatphobia," has featured anti-Semitic speakers, and is now the subject of an internal review."
Then from my initial comment:
"They also made their curriculum worse by cutting out a bunch of preclinical time and wasting student time on mandatory DEI classes. Not a leap at all to say both are likely responsible."
I have no idea where you got the idea that either myself or the Free Beacon didn't "entertain" this factor. I will easily say that I think that most of the decline in UCLA medical education is due to their new curriculum. It's a sad reality that I'm in a position where I have to remain anonymous in sharing opinions against racial discrimination so I don't jeopardize residency admissions. But, let's just say that I'm at a med school very similar to UCLA--a top 10 program with a recently updated curriculum that shortens preclinical learning, and wasted much of our time in classes on equity and justice that were often opportunities for the teachers just to force their ideological opinions on us (using BMI is fatphobic). We had a fraction of the time in anatomy lab as that of the previous curriculum, so we could spend more time learning about racism and how to be a good person (as they see it).
And it shows, by the way. Some of my classmates have much worse anatomical knowledge (according to the surgeons I've worked with) than previous classes, and I've had to spend a lot of time utilizing online resources to improve my own anatomy knowledge.
2. As other comments have pointed out, the test is graded on a curve. My last shelf score report specifically told me the national cohort of students I was being compared to (those that took the same exam between 8/22-7/23). The curve and passing grades for these exams are set by students also impacted by COVID and Zoom school. There's something particularly wrong at UCLA.
So, your point 1 is directly considered by the Free Beacon (and myself), and your point 2 is irrelevant. Admissions standards have generally risen (higher gpa and test scores over time) so you'll get comments like that from older docs, but admissions standards to elite institutions have in some cases fallen for certain racial or gender minorities when there's a Dean Lucero there who has racial/gender preferences. All racial/gender discrimination is bad.
Dear Med Student7...I'd like to learn more about your experience in med school now that social justice is a major emphasis. If you can talk (on or off the record) please email me at slsatel@gmail.com (Sally Satel MD...thank you!)
Excellent points throughout. But, I think you are giving UCLA way too much benefit of the doubt.
The AAMC releases the average GPA/MCATs of all matriculants to US medical schools stratified by racial group. (https://www.aamc.org/media/6066/download) I highly doubt UCLA would have a smaller variance between racial groups than the national averages given what I know about about its admissions committee. And UCLA could put this issue to rest in a heartbeat by releasing average GPA/MCATs of each racial group (yes, they have this data). But, they will never do this because it will show UCLA in clear violation of Prop. 209 and that their current Dean is a liar.
The whole "holistic admissions" BS is a smokescreen to hide vile and illegal racial social engineering. A wealthy black student with two physician parents has a much, much easier time getting admitted to an elite US medical school compared to similarly qualified Asian with working class immigrant parents.
I can access it by searching, as you said. Substack is appending a closing paren , ), to the URL for some reason when I click the link - https://diversity.ucsf.edu/data-reports/student-scorecard works. Maybe a bug specific to the app on the old phone OS I'm using.
I was taking a maintenance a certification course in Washington DC. I received a call on my cell phone urgently and when I picked it up a paramedic answered and said that my wife had a severe headache, collapsed and was now unresponsive, and they were taking her to emergency room. I don't know how I got back to the hotel. It was snowing out and eventually I think I asked the police. I eventually called the emergency room I said who I was and that I wanted to speak to the emergency room. Instantly emergency room doctor answered. He said hold on went into the room and said my wife was awake and was answering questions. He said I'll do the work up give me your cell. I was able to make it to the airport with my practice buying a ticket literally an hour before the plane was to takeoff
I got through security and he called. I could tell by the tone of his voice there was a problem. He said it's a subdural and the neurosurgeon is on his way.
In a moment of clarity, I said look I don't know who you are, but you seem to know your business. If this was your wife, would you transfer her or would you allow the surgeon who is coming in to operate? He paused and he said this person is ok if it was another night, probably no
There you have it. He was a phenomenal surgeon and my wife who is an intensive care unit nurse would not agree to the surgery unless he promised not to shave her head and cut off her hair. He was so kind and was actually excited at this. He came out of the OR and the first thing he said was "did you see your wife hair ? It looks great. I didn't even use stitches. I used glue. She could shampoo her hair tonight.! " never mind her hair . How about her brain? He said oh no problem. It was a minor problem. She'll be fine.
It was the first time he had ever done this and I think he was excited. Other than a headache postop that was pretty bad, She had 100% recovery with zero residual. Turns out she was sitting playing with a grandbaby next to a wooden framed bed. She moved her head back to avoid hitting the babies head while playing and she hit her head on the edge of the wood frame.
What is the bottom line?
We talk about quality. We talk about testing and measurements.
The truth is as physicians we all know where the bodies are buried . We know who the other doctors who will see ourselves and who will treat our families and our patients and who are the physicians that are off the list.
We can't do anything about it for fear lawsuits ,being ostracized or being fired by health systems, etc.
We can point fingers about admissions at medical schools but sadly, there's more to the story.
You want the best and brightest to enter med school. But when they're out even if they pass tests, they still may be incapable.
We do not want to waste their education, but we need to have a system that deals with incompetence and the current one is probably making us feel good but I doubt it's helping anything.
It’s not just medical school. The quality of nursing students is also in question; however, I’m not convinced this is related to diversity as much as a broader problem with public education. I typically have sophomore level students who are unable to multiply by 2 in their head. They lack basic understanding of anatomy and physiology. They cannot pronounce medical terminology correctly. We need to seriously overhaul the public education system because this is the beginning of failing upward.
I think it’s definitely quality of education (pop up nursing schools just trying to make money, more online education, change in culture at work (can’t teach nurses as well bc many are offended when they get called out and people don’t want to get in trouble). Many Nurse practitioner students are now doing all online classes and are no longer required to have worked in their field of choice prior to school. The quality is definitely down for these reasons. But I also do know of a few stories regarding under represent minority students- such as an admin telling a professor to pass a student who failed all exams and was failing the class- bc the student had had a hard life (was a minority student- POC and male). This is very scary. Our duty is to be the best for our patients. Passing a failing student does nothing for the student or our patients.
the message, thanks to the medical school debacle, is don't go to any doctor who isn't old (or old school). the message, thanks to the covid debacle, is don't go to a doctor with an established practice who is dependent on pharmaceutical bribes and has an entrenched belief in the drug based system.
i guess the message is: DON'T GO TO DOCTORS. unless you've got a broken bone, a gunshot wound or have been run over by a car. conventional doctors are good at that stuff. what they are not good at is chronic disease- heart disease, cancer, diabetes- all decades of mission creep.
a witch doctor or a snake oil salesman has a better shot with that stuff.
For point number one, isn't this test bell-curved? So a high fail rate is already normalized against peers who lived through the same COVID era of horrible Zooms.
I found your substack via Aaron Sibarium who re-tweeted your tweet. Thank you for the analysis.
As you mention, he is a good reporter and I wondered how the data for the UCLA column were standing up. Yet the reason I trust the initial thrust of his column is far more detailed data from the Harvard case. And what is portrayed as happening at UCLA is keeping with general patterns.
Would be wonderful if UCLA med school released anonymized and honest data on admissions. But doubtful that will happen. That such an august school also responded to a serious charge so evasively speaks poorly of its administration--not the majority of its faculty, I sense.
When I was in college affirmative action was all the rage. I graduated in 1990. This period we are living in is worse by magnitudes. It creates an environment where all is questioned and it should be especially in medicine. This will only hurt the minority in the long run. The system is broken and needs to be corrected…..merit is the way out, will we take it???????
I think you are off a bit here, Vinay. It was a hard hitting news article with very interesting info. He does not have access to enough info to do a proper research project. That isn’t the purpose behind journalism. He does have enough info and it was presented well enough to force the board of governors do a full deep
Dive into the apparent problem. If they don’t the writer did his job, and they didn’t.
This is the state of America today. The right generally has a point, even if not perfectly articulated or well researched. And the left is WAY over the line and covers it up, protects and doubles down on bad policy, and gets their base fired up instead of being introspective. Politics over policies. Unlike the G W Bush era, the left is far more scary and deranged than the right these days
Sibarium is usually far more thorough and is able to get more comprehensive data. I don't think UCLA med school is going to release anything else.
The fact that you don't realize the right implements the same exact methodology (and I would argue, much more often than the left) you just described shows your lack of being introspective. The right is literally trying to steal elections and you find the left more scary? C'mon, guy!
Obviously everyone has their own biases, risk assessments and priorities, but yeah, trying to sell the right as more reasonable, less crazy and less risky in the era of Trump and MAGA is kind of funny. The truth is that both sides have given a lot of ammunition to the other side.
It's reasonable to attack the left for affirmative action, DIE, pro-crime prosecutors, and weak-on-crime legislation, but the right has plenty of its own madness. Also, while Democrats are now voting out pro-crime prosecutors and voting for tough-on-crime legislation, the same kind of backlash doesn't seem to be happening on the right.
Let's look at some examples. In the Bush era, people rightly attacked the right for denying climate change; nowadays, not only do they maintain that position, but they have also added the anti-vax movement and all sorts of anti-science and conspiracy lunacy to their repertoire. In the Bush era, people were worried about the religious right, well, now they have managed to reverse Roe vs Wade and red states continue to ban abortion and medical treatment for women, even when the majority of people in those states are against such extremist bans. And let's not forget that the right now has a serious difficulty accepting elections that they lose, and the guy who is going to be the Republican presidential candidate literally tried to steal an election that he lost.
Vinay, I have much of the data to which you refer from two different medical schools (where I sit on/interact with the admissions committee). I have the correlation between "admitted because URM" and failing and it is over 0.7. The remediators in virtually every block are almost all URMs.
No one (especially in committee) will discuss this, but it is well understood. The keepers of this horribleness are those in charge, sadly. They will brook not a word against the narrative.
The premise, as idiotic as it is, is that Indian doctors do better at taking care of Indians, black doctors do better at taking care of blacks, etc. It is 100% wrong. I have yet to meet a doctor who really cared what the race of their patient was (yes, there is probably one somewhere, but not the point); the good doctors do the best for whoever is sitting on the exam table. EVERY race needs the best doctor...not the one that looks like them. Thinking otherwise is both demeaning and stupid and is characteristic of AWFUL people (like the UCLA admissions dean) and their male acolytes.
You could/should gather this information from UCSF. Maybe we could pool numbers and see how prevalent this all is. But everywhere I have looked, the results are the same.
I feel like I am being gaslit on this issue. it's really not that complicated. if you lower admissions standards you get poorer results. The people that want to argue endlessly about the data are lacking in the most basic of common sense. Im sorry but I'm not going to UCLA teaching hospital if I have any medical issues. My health is more important than blind fealty to a leftist religious idealogy I have never signed up for. UCLA obviously knows this is true, which is exactly why they could release this data but simply won't. it would be the easiest thing in the world to disprove the reporting. But they can't. because it's obviously true.
Hey Mathew, since you are presumably more intelligent than the average URM student, can you do me a favor and explain how a rising GPA and MCAT average over the last 4 years means that standards have been LOWERED?
Please explain, because right now it seems evident that physicians are sticking their heads in the sand in order to peddle racist narratives. And that is wildly unbecoming.
Rising averages, alone, tell us nothing about how data is distributed. When you visualize medical school class statistics, they are typically multimodal distributions with each mode representing a racial group (MCAT on the x-axis and number of students on the y-axis.)
As we continue to relax objective admissions requirements for URM applicants, we are also seeing increased standards for non-URM applicants. In other words, the average of the entire class rises while the average for URM admits within that class falls.
This is because there are more non-URM students than there are URM students in any given class. Thus, an increase in the average for non-URM students affects the total class average more than a decrease in the average for URM students.
Hey Fred the reporting made it clear the GPA for the students in question had lower GPAs than average. I am deeply deeply sorry that these facts are inconvenient for you and I'm sorry that the only way you want to choose to have a discussion is by first throwing out ugly race baiting in your first line. I can't help but notice you are attacking me for reasons I don't understand and not the OP in this thread who says he has the data and confirms much of the story
I was thinking the exact same thing regarding collecting the UCSF data and doing his own analysis. I would be very curious to see those results.
The premise is indeed misstated.
The reality is that (Black, Indian, Chinese, Latino…pick your ethnic/cultural background and self-affiliation) ALL have a bias towards positively assessing their communities representation amongst trainees.
Overseeing it all is largely a Jewish (mixed nationality) cultural identity., at the administrative level.
This is a fact at administrative executive levels at UCLA (and perhaps at UC in general), and I believe that’s one of the key reasons why redirecting the causes/effect from the problem at hand (the placement of subpar doctors in the LA and broader California community), and to label it as a student and trainee diversity problem and not an administrative selection problem is in place.
Frankly, having worked with the Dean at UCLA for 2 decades, I can declare that his personal viewpoint is actually quite in line with the Journalist from the conservative news site.
If he could have it his way, he would fill his classes with largely (subservient) top of the line minorities (pick your color), provided he got to embed preordained Jewish physician-scientists and administrative leaders to lead them into the next generation.
And in this venture, he actually has Bruin “shareholder” support.
Accordingly, I don’t believe he really cares what happens to the University’s reputation or the caliber of new doctors put out in the short term.
What’s KEY is that control over ucla-administrative processes is maintained as it currently is over the long haul, at one of the largest employers and land grant public institutions in the United States.
Dear Dr. K
Would you be willing to share your data? I am doing a project involving compromised standards and its relationship, if any, to URM status. thanks so much. Feel free to email me at slsatel@gmail.com (Sally Satel MD) Thank you very much.
I'm a big fan of Vinay's but the criticism of the free beacon article is what ~actually~ seems lazy here. The free beacon article is working off of information directly leaked from members of the UCLA admissions committee and their professors. This is entirely unheard of in medical admissions--for your own faculty (on the admissions committee!) to leak your embarassing data to the press in order to share that they're so concerned with what's happening at their school they WANT their school to be embarrassed. Saying "oh but they posted their story without 1 to 1 data of how the URM students inappropriately accepted into the school performed on their exams" (data which no journalist would get access to ever) is an impossible standard. Moreover, saying that this story was anywhere below the standards of modern journalism is...laughable. This story had more access to data than any other similar story and provided an unprecedented view behind the scenes of this admissions committee.
As for proving that DEI admissions are problematic and were at play here...you read direct language from members of the admissions committee that students were admitted into the school with GPA and test scores far below the average specifically because of their race ("we need students like this here", "we have enough of HIS KIND") and the school's test scores went down. That's not a huge leap. They also made their curriculum worse by cutting out a bunch of preclinical time and wasting student time on mandatory DEI classes. Not a leap at all to say both are likely responsible.
None of that even addresses how this is very likely both unconstitutional on a federal level and directly violates california law. Embarrassing story all around for UCLA and this free beacon article was an important look into what has been destroying this school and much of medical education.
This! This is why I read comments. As a former journalist, I can say for sure that the data that would prove the Beacon's point will never ever be disclosed to a journalist.
Look, we are both medical students and have an intimate understanding of med school. Vinay's points stand, and the Free Beacon article doesn't entertain two other factors at play in the failure data, and neither do you.
1. The curriculum at UCLA underwent a significant shift to a 1-year preclinical curriculum. This change implies that students may not be adequately prepared for the clerkships, as they might not have been exposed to key topics observed on the wards. This could be a significant contributing factor to increased failures.
2. Many of these students were impacted by COVID and Zoom school. The Zoom schooling could also have led to a subpar learning environment and made the students ill-prepared for their clerkships.
So, it's evident that the Free Beacon article needs to be more thorough. While it's true that this journalist may never obtain race-disaggregated data, it's equally true that he fails to consider these other crucial factors. A drop in admissions standards could also influence the failure rate, but it's ironic when many doctors today claim they wouldn't have been accepted into medical school with the current standards. Comments like these suggest that the admissions standards are significantly higher than in the past for older doctors, the age group of doctors supporters of this analysis supposedly only trust now.
Truly no disrespect, but either you did not read the Free Beacon story or my comment fully, or your bias has erased it from your memory. Both the Free Beacon article and my initial comment directly mention your point 1. From the Free Beacon story:
"The collapse in qualifications has been compounded by UCLA's decision, in 2020, to condense its preclinical curriculum from two years to one...That means students arrive at their clinical rotations with just a year of courses under their belt—some of which focus less on science than social justice. First-year students spend three to four hours every other week in "Structural Racism and Health Equity," a required class that covers topics like "fatphobia," has featured anti-Semitic speakers, and is now the subject of an internal review."
Then from my initial comment:
"They also made their curriculum worse by cutting out a bunch of preclinical time and wasting student time on mandatory DEI classes. Not a leap at all to say both are likely responsible."
I have no idea where you got the idea that either myself or the Free Beacon didn't "entertain" this factor. I will easily say that I think that most of the decline in UCLA medical education is due to their new curriculum. It's a sad reality that I'm in a position where I have to remain anonymous in sharing opinions against racial discrimination so I don't jeopardize residency admissions. But, let's just say that I'm at a med school very similar to UCLA--a top 10 program with a recently updated curriculum that shortens preclinical learning, and wasted much of our time in classes on equity and justice that were often opportunities for the teachers just to force their ideological opinions on us (using BMI is fatphobic). We had a fraction of the time in anatomy lab as that of the previous curriculum, so we could spend more time learning about racism and how to be a good person (as they see it).
And it shows, by the way. Some of my classmates have much worse anatomical knowledge (according to the surgeons I've worked with) than previous classes, and I've had to spend a lot of time utilizing online resources to improve my own anatomy knowledge.
But UCLA has something especially bad going on if they have 50% of students in a block failing a shelf exam, and even 23.8% of the class having failed THREE OR MORE shelf exams. That's a really big deal. Despite my accelerated curriculum and not having taken step 1 before any shelf exam, I still passed them all on the first try. The important point here is this change to the curriculum was motivated in part by inclusion of DEI principles and centering a social justice education instead of just focusing on actual medical education (https://freebeacon.com/campus/pedagogical-malpractice-inside-ucla-medical-schools-mandatory-health-equity-class/) (https://freebeacon.com/campus/ucla-med-school-requires-students-to-attend-lecture-where-speaker-demands-prayer-for-mama-earth-leads-chants-of-free-palestine/) and that same way of thinking has infected their admissions policies.
2. As other comments have pointed out, the test is graded on a curve. My last shelf score report specifically told me the national cohort of students I was being compared to (those that took the same exam between 8/22-7/23). The curve and passing grades for these exams are set by students also impacted by COVID and Zoom school. There's something particularly wrong at UCLA.
So, your point 1 is directly considered by the Free Beacon (and myself), and your point 2 is irrelevant. Admissions standards have generally risen (higher gpa and test scores over time) so you'll get comments like that from older docs, but admissions standards to elite institutions have in some cases fallen for certain racial or gender minorities when there's a Dean Lucero there who has racial/gender preferences. All racial/gender discrimination is bad.
Dear Med Student7...I'd like to learn more about your experience in med school now that social justice is a major emphasis. If you can talk (on or off the record) please email me at slsatel@gmail.com (Sally Satel MD...thank you!)
Excellent points throughout. But, I think you are giving UCLA way too much benefit of the doubt.
The AAMC releases the average GPA/MCATs of all matriculants to US medical schools stratified by racial group. (https://www.aamc.org/media/6066/download) I highly doubt UCLA would have a smaller variance between racial groups than the national averages given what I know about about its admissions committee. And UCLA could put this issue to rest in a heartbeat by releasing average GPA/MCATs of each racial group (yes, they have this data). But, they will never do this because it will show UCLA in clear violation of Prop. 209 and that their current Dean is a liar.
The whole "holistic admissions" BS is a smokescreen to hide vile and illegal racial social engineering. A wealthy black student with two physician parents has a much, much easier time getting admitted to an elite US medical school compared to similarly qualified Asian with working class immigrant parents.
And Dr. Prasad perhaps you should inquire about why the number of white medical students at UCSF has been almost cut in half in just five years? (https://diversity.ucsf.edu/data-reports/student-scorecard)
Still works for me. Try starting with a google search with "UCSF diversity scorecard" keywords and you should be able to find the data.
I can access it by searching, as you said. Substack is appending a closing paren , ), to the URL for some reason when I click the link - https://diversity.ucsf.edu/data-reports/student-scorecard works. Maybe a bug specific to the app on the old phone OS I'm using.
I was taking a maintenance a certification course in Washington DC. I received a call on my cell phone urgently and when I picked it up a paramedic answered and said that my wife had a severe headache, collapsed and was now unresponsive, and they were taking her to emergency room. I don't know how I got back to the hotel. It was snowing out and eventually I think I asked the police. I eventually called the emergency room I said who I was and that I wanted to speak to the emergency room. Instantly emergency room doctor answered. He said hold on went into the room and said my wife was awake and was answering questions. He said I'll do the work up give me your cell. I was able to make it to the airport with my practice buying a ticket literally an hour before the plane was to takeoff
I got through security and he called. I could tell by the tone of his voice there was a problem. He said it's a subdural and the neurosurgeon is on his way.
In a moment of clarity, I said look I don't know who you are, but you seem to know your business. If this was your wife, would you transfer her or would you allow the surgeon who is coming in to operate? He paused and he said this person is ok if it was another night, probably no
There you have it. He was a phenomenal surgeon and my wife who is an intensive care unit nurse would not agree to the surgery unless he promised not to shave her head and cut off her hair. He was so kind and was actually excited at this. He came out of the OR and the first thing he said was "did you see your wife hair ? It looks great. I didn't even use stitches. I used glue. She could shampoo her hair tonight.! " never mind her hair . How about her brain? He said oh no problem. It was a minor problem. She'll be fine.
It was the first time he had ever done this and I think he was excited. Other than a headache postop that was pretty bad, She had 100% recovery with zero residual. Turns out she was sitting playing with a grandbaby next to a wooden framed bed. She moved her head back to avoid hitting the babies head while playing and she hit her head on the edge of the wood frame.
What is the bottom line?
We talk about quality. We talk about testing and measurements.
The truth is as physicians we all know where the bodies are buried . We know who the other doctors who will see ourselves and who will treat our families and our patients and who are the physicians that are off the list.
We can't do anything about it for fear lawsuits ,being ostracized or being fired by health systems, etc.
We can point fingers about admissions at medical schools but sadly, there's more to the story.
You want the best and brightest to enter med school. But when they're out even if they pass tests, they still may be incapable.
We do not want to waste their education, but we need to have a system that deals with incompetence and the current one is probably making us feel good but I doubt it's helping anything.
It’s not just medical school. The quality of nursing students is also in question; however, I’m not convinced this is related to diversity as much as a broader problem with public education. I typically have sophomore level students who are unable to multiply by 2 in their head. They lack basic understanding of anatomy and physiology. They cannot pronounce medical terminology correctly. We need to seriously overhaul the public education system because this is the beginning of failing upward.
I think it’s definitely quality of education (pop up nursing schools just trying to make money, more online education, change in culture at work (can’t teach nurses as well bc many are offended when they get called out and people don’t want to get in trouble). Many Nurse practitioner students are now doing all online classes and are no longer required to have worked in their field of choice prior to school. The quality is definitely down for these reasons. But I also do know of a few stories regarding under represent minority students- such as an admin telling a professor to pass a student who failed all exams and was failing the class- bc the student had had a hard life (was a minority student- POC and male). This is very scary. Our duty is to be the best for our patients. Passing a failing student does nothing for the student or our patients.
the message, thanks to the medical school debacle, is don't go to any doctor who isn't old (or old school). the message, thanks to the covid debacle, is don't go to a doctor with an established practice who is dependent on pharmaceutical bribes and has an entrenched belief in the drug based system.
i guess the message is: DON'T GO TO DOCTORS. unless you've got a broken bone, a gunshot wound or have been run over by a car. conventional doctors are good at that stuff. what they are not good at is chronic disease- heart disease, cancer, diabetes- all decades of mission creep.
a witch doctor or a snake oil salesman has a better shot with that stuff.
For point number one, isn't this test bell-curved? So a high fail rate is already normalized against peers who lived through the same COVID era of horrible Zooms.
You are correct.
I found your substack via Aaron Sibarium who re-tweeted your tweet. Thank you for the analysis.
As you mention, he is a good reporter and I wondered how the data for the UCLA column were standing up. Yet the reason I trust the initial thrust of his column is far more detailed data from the Harvard case. And what is portrayed as happening at UCLA is keeping with general patterns.
Would be wonderful if UCLA med school released anonymized and honest data on admissions. But doubtful that will happen. That such an august school also responded to a serious charge so evasively speaks poorly of its administration--not the majority of its faculty, I sense.
One thing that struck me was how many people were willing to name names. Dean Lucero has not endeared herself to the UCLA faculty.
That’s the ultimate purpose of medical school-to create capable clinicians. Ability and ethics. Nothing else matters
When I was in college affirmative action was all the rage. I graduated in 1990. This period we are living in is worse by magnitudes. It creates an environment where all is questioned and it should be especially in medicine. This will only hurt the minority in the long run. The system is broken and needs to be corrected…..merit is the way out, will we take it???????
How about just training COMPETENT Doctors who won't go into high-paid specialties? Ya know, the ones who treat AVERAGE people?
Looks like you settled for an average editor. You can do better.
Was there an editor? Or perhaps editing was deferred? Perhaps to the comment section?
The graphs are difficult to read and there is no explanation of the terms used. Very disappointing presentation and difficult to understand.
I think you are off a bit here, Vinay. It was a hard hitting news article with very interesting info. He does not have access to enough info to do a proper research project. That isn’t the purpose behind journalism. He does have enough info and it was presented well enough to force the board of governors do a full deep
Dive into the apparent problem. If they don’t the writer did his job, and they didn’t.