Tuesday, April 24, 2018

The Politicization of the MCAT | The Weekly Standard

The Politicization of the MCAT | The Weekly Standard:
"...The AAMC occupies a curious place in the world of medicine. 
It forms one-half of the only government-approved accrediting entity for U.S. medical schools, and it is solely in charge of administering both the MCAT and the national standardized medical school application. 
...And in recent years, it has used this leverage to fundamentally alter the way medical schools assess applicants.
Image result for liberal med school testDr. Darrell Kirch, president and CEO of the AAMC, expressed his vision in a candid 2011 speech at the University of California, Davis: "I am a man on a mission. I believe it is critical to our future to transform health care. I'm not talking about tweaking it. I'm not talking about some nuanced improvements here and there. I'm talking about true transformation."
...he praised the White Coats for Black Lives movement, a medical-student organization inspired by Black Lives Matter, for "sparking dialogue rather than division" by "staging on-campus die-ins." White Coats for Black Lives lobbies, among other things, for the creation of "national medical school curricular standards" that would mandate the teaching of "structural racism" and "unconscious racial bias" in medical schools.
...But it is Kirch's reform of the MCAT that raises the most concern.
  • ...One MCAT practice question (from a collaboration between the AAMC and online-education nonprofit Khan Academy), for example, asks whether the wage gap between men and women is the result of bigotry, sexism, racism, or biological differences (no other options are provided, and the "correct" answer is sexism). 
  • Another asks whether the "lack of minorities such as African Americans or Latinos/Latinas among university faculty members" is due to symbolic racism, institutional racism, hidden racism, or personal bias (the correct answer is institutional racism). 
  • Yet another asks test-takers to select from a list of debatable definitions for "the terms 'sex' and 'gender.'"...
  • Read on!

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