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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13964 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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I don't see any reason why med school in the US couldn't use a similar combination of SAT scores and a dedicated entrance exam if they wanted to. Move the exam date slightly later, have the high school graduation in May and there's really nothing that would prevent a similar entrance exam based system.

I mean other than that's not how we do it here?

The woke have just run through a multi decade mostly successful plan to get rid of the ACT/SAT for general undergrad admissions and it's only now starting to cool off. They even managed to kill one of the physician licensing exams (making Step 1 pass/fail - was the main way to discriminate amongst candidates prior, and now the situation is awful).

Even beyond that extracurriculars have been a core part of admissions of all kinds in the U.S. for over a hundred years. It started as a way to discriminate against Jews and is now a way to discriminate against Asians and for other minorities but it's part of the environment and making it go away is a total non-starter.

You won't be able to change it just for medical education.

If your answer is "because the schools outright don't want to", then you should go and actually say it. Otherwise you're just stuck in a "We have to do it like this because this is how we do it"-loop that leads to absolutely nowhere.

I still don't see any reason that would prevent those med schools from just doing it if they wanted to. Which student is going to say "No, I'll just go and do a pointless and expensive intermediate degree instead and only then apply to what I actually want to study." Having entrance exams certainly doesn't seem to be any problem for various art schools that award university degrees, so there doesn't appear to be any fundamental limit to that.

If the answer is that we have to make massive changes to the entire structure of higher education in the US (and secondary education, too, since most high schools graduate in June), then that isn't really an answer. Not having to pay tuition will also encourage more people to go to medical school, as is the case where you are. I agree with you generally, but I don't think that it's feasible to suggest we overhaul our entire educational system.

Let me back up and reiterate - the culture in the vast majority of undergraduate and graduate programs and types of program in the U.S. is that they have a holistic admission process that requires candidates to do a variety of things beyond just take a test and excel at it.

It's water. We don't do that here. And importantly - wokeness has made this orders of magnitudes worse.

You want that to change you have to reorganize the way education is done in the U.S. top to bottom, that's a big change and med schools aren't going to lead it.

Students, parents, the government - everyone expects extracurriculars and other holistic admission processes to be the lay of the land.

You are saying "well stop playing basketball, just play football instead." That is a ....big project.

Now as an adjacent matter I do believe the holistic admission process is in many ways better, but that's a separate thing.

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