<p>"experience of hard study is a good thing for future docs, don't you think?"</p>
<p>Perhaps, but there is so much in pre-med, medical school, and residency that has nothing to do with preparing one to be a good doctor. In fact, the experience can contribute to the loss of empathy that patients would like to see in their doctors. Pre-med can be bad, med school worse and internship the worst. Being abused in an undergraduate Organic class or staying up 36 hours straight every other night as an intern to draw blood, change dressings, transport patients to/from radiology and the like - how does this make one a better doctor? End of rant.</p>
<p>I had the good fortune of taking Organic Chem as a post-bacc student from an enlightened professor who actually believed it was his job to teach organic chemistry and not do the job of the pre-med counselors or the med school admissions committee. Much of your grade depended on how you did on the weekly quizzes. And after the first week there were two given, one on that week's subject and the other on the previous week's subject though not the same exact test. If you did poorly one week you could retake the test the following week and whichever grade was higher was what went on your record. If you did well enough the first time you didn't have to take the test a second time. But, if you didn't, it gave you a week to review the material and ask for help before the retake if you wanted to improve your score. The process was quite transparent. As a result people actually learned some Org. Chem. and it wasn't just a trial by fire.</p>
<p>I was an engineer before med school and Organic Chemistry serves as an introduction to medical education. You cannot treat it as advanced chemistry
because too much memorization is required. Memorization is required for all anatomy, histology and pathology, almost every day for two years.</p>
<p>The trick to getting an A is to memorize the reactions. This runs counter to most courses in the sciences where you can figure things out. Engineers hate memorization, so for me it was a battle at first, to realize that you cannot figure it out.</p>
<p>You memorize the reactions and then on exams recognize the reaction the
prof is looking for. Then you apply the unique rules regarding that particular reaction. For isomers models are absolutely a necessity to visualize the molecules. If you follow these rules it is possible to get an A. </p>
<p>When my oldest son took organic two years ago, I spent a few days before he left for school building models with pipe cleaners and coloring the tips
with magic markers to identify the atoms and demonstrate R and L isomers.
He laughed about it and thought the models were ridiculous. When I visited him months later molecular models were on his desk. Yes, I refrained from saying "I told you so", but he did get two A s.</p>
<p>SciDoc has it right. The reason Ochem is so important to the med school folks is because first semester is a measure of your ability to memorize vast quantities of information very rapidly, then second semester you get to apply that knowledge in a process of deductive reasoning (synthesis) - you can't get past the memorization, and it has to come first.</p>
<p>There seems to be a system at work here.
My son is taking O Chem 1 honors, with 25 kids in the class. The teacher said only 3 could get A's and one kid is taking the class for a second time (so he consumes one of the likely A's). I don't know how many B's he is doleing out. The prof claims that he grades on a curve in order to smooth out variations in his tests, from class to class. I'm getting the feeling that it is part of the weeding out many of you mention.</p>
<p>scidoc: I pasted your post in an email to my son. That is a very succinct and useful plan. My son has definitely used the models, although he also felt that he wouldn't need them.</p>
<p>It is simply short-sighted that we essentially disable many aspiring students [whom potentially could be] fine doctors by the end of the sophmore year with O.C., and that the U.S. imports physicians (nothing against them) but we still can't serve the neediest regions or disciplines (primary care, children etc).</p>
<p>Let's be fair: the bottleneck is in the number of places in the medical schools (job protection) rather than in the "weed-out" classes. If the schools don't do the weed-out classes, they will either have to weed out candidates at a later stage (through med school preadmissions committees - some schools do that as well), or accept much higher rates of rejection by the med schools themselves (something that would threaten the reputations of the prestige schools.)</p>
<p>The lesson? If there is one, go to a second-tier state university and do well if you wish to go to med school. (or attend Hope or Kalamazoo Colleges).</p>
<p>I have no particular axe to grind vis a vis med school..... but I do think some sort of weeding mechanism is useful. My kids had dozens of classmates in HS who wanted to be doctors.... most of whom were bad in math and hated science other than biology, ie. didn't like a science that required calculations vs. memorization. I'm assuming those are the kids who get weeded out in O chem and frankly, they're all better off in another profession (go be a social worker if you want to help people but don't like science.)</p>
<p>Do you want an oncologist who flunked o-chem? Do you want an orthopedic surgeon who never learned physics? do you want someone running a clinical trial who "loves medicine but doesn't like statistics" (direct quote from an allegedly pre-med classmate of my son's)?</p>
<p>If o-chem is a discipline that requires vast amounts of memorization, as noted above (I never took it, so I wouldn't know firsthand), then the criteria for obtaining a grade for the class should <em>be</em> mastery of the material, not where someone ends up in the bell curve of the class. It would be theoretically possible for ALL students in the class to master the material...or ALL to NOT master it. Some of the weeding out <em>is</em> gratuitous based on an inappropriate grading system.</p>
<p>I got a B in orgo- and I'm a physician. Kept making stupid mistakes on the exams, I was so nervous.
Do I want an oncologist who flunked ochem? I'm a ped oncologist, and don't remember a danged thing. It was completely irrelevant- even biochem didn't have much to do with orgo. More important for oncologists to know the lit, the latest, stats, and have compassion. Surgeon who flunked physics? I really don't care- as long as he/she knows the latest in techniques and has done many of the procedure. I don't think there has been a correlation with outcomes and grades in college.</p>
<p>"then the criteria for obtaining a grade for the class should <em>be</em> mastery of the material, not where someone ends up in the bell curve of the class."</p>
<p>That would actually be cruel, given that if all or most master the material, they will go on thinking they are future doctors when, in fact, the bottleneck ensures they won't be. The bell curve is exactly the way med school admissions work.</p>
<p>Whether it is the right bell curve is another issue entirely (but then SATs likely reflect the wrong bell curve as well and, unlike the test of "mastery of the material", they aren't a test of merit at all.)</p>
To me, it makes SENSE in this context...but not in the context of a class in which mastery of material is the issue. In med school admissions, more is taken into account than the mastery of the material in one college class, and you are, by definition, competing against everyone else.</p>
<p>It might "make sense", but it would be cruel. It would lead to thousands of more students doing entire pre-med curricula, only to be denied recommendations by their own school's med school screening committee or, if not, then by the med schools themselves. It would be a huge waste of university resources, and those of the students and their families.</p>
<p>And, yes, thousands of folks who would make fine physicians are lost in the process either way.</p>
No less cruel than telling a bunch of college kids who have mastered material that they DIDN'T. As far as the other...well, you see athletes sacrifice ALL THE TIME for the CHANCE of making the Olympics, when we all know the percentage of those who actually do. Should we rig all of the competitions leading up to the Olympics so as not to disappoint later? :confused:</p>
<p>Actually we do EXACTLY that. In gymnastics, for example, we set a bar of minimum skills. 80% of those who get that far pass the minimum skills. Then we hold a competition - a test - of all those who have already MASTERED those skills, and through a radical bell curve approach, accept those very, very few who, having mastered the skill, are thought to do it best.</p>
<p>We reject outright 95% of those who have mastered the skills, based on a single test upon which they performed well.</p>
<p>And for heavens sake how about people who would just like to take Organic Chemistry and have no interest in medicine? I took Physics with pre-meds because it was required for architecture school, and they made the course miserable.</p>
<p>Are you sure? Isn't there a minimum skill required before one might enter the Olympic trials? Aren't only those who have mastered those skills allowed into the Olympic trials? And then, aren't 95% of them eliminated before getting to the Olympic training camps even though they have mastered the skills?</p>