<p>Remember the joke: what do you call the kid who graduates last in the class from Harvard Med?
And the answer is: “Doctor.”</p>
<p>I call a kid coming off the WL at MIT, an admit.</p>
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<p>Which is too bad. Information is being thrown away.</p>
<p>Has there been a study correlating class rank of doctors and/or their scores on the USMLE with measures of physician quality? Other things being equal, I’d rather see a doctor who graduated near the top of his class and with high USMLE scores rather than just passing ones. For some reason it is considered uncouth to ask professionals such questions about their backgrounds.</p>
<p>Chances are that someone graduating near the bottom of Harvard Med could be at the top of some other med schools…It’s all relative…</p>
<p>Bel, you are back to preconceived notions. And the authority of stats.</p>
<p>These kids who may have scored some points behind their counterparts from “better” backgrounds, are not being picked at random, based on some mutated nobless oblige. For elite colleges, they have the 4’s and 5’s in AP tests, straight A records, meaningful (and I mean legitimately meaningful) ECs, knocked themselves out and often far outshine their “easier lives” counterparts. Their recs are excited. Their essays are thoughtful and relevant. </p>
<p>They show their potential, drive, maturity and judgment skills- and results- as individuals. NOT based on what Mummy or Daddy accomplished. In fact, it is sometimes quite obvious that the “privileged” kids are resting on what M & D could afford them, not their own drives and self-sought challenges.</p>
<p>So, to go back to Blossom’s comment that they are trying to more or less fill the U’s needs, I’d add, fill them with the best kids they can get. And even after extracting the dodos, there are more than can be accommodated.</p>
<p>This is the extraordinary side to admisisons and the look it gives into K-12. Granted, I see a rare slice, but the public notion that all underresourced high schools are failing all kids is, well, a generalization. And, even if you think the context is different, that their LoRs are coming from teachers who rarely see quality, these LoRs are often written in a style that suggests these teachers are every bit as good at setting standards and rating quality as in wealthier neighborhoods. </p>
<p>This is why I get so annoyed at generalizations and assumptions. Or the idea that CC can tell by stats and SES, who’s got the goods. Or that, with our own perspective and experience, we just know where a kid should place. And, you haven’t even seen, in most cases, their actual apps.</p>
<p>This might be the silliest argument I’ve ever read on any discussion board anywhere. “optimal match”? In whose eyes?? No matter WHAT the adcoms ANYWHERE think about who “belongs” at their school, do we REALLY think we have a lock on what a bunch of 17 and 18 year old kids are all about, and what they’ll be doing 40 years later (the snowflake “destined” to win the Nobel). PLEASE.</p>
<p>My ex is a brilliant man. One of those mathy-sciency kids who had the answers before the questions got asked. Taught his teachers programming in the days before high schools even offered it…got admitted to MIT, to no one’s surprise. Turned it down because…there’s no good skiiing nearby. Went to a state flagship-the horrors! And yet…if you’ve ever traveled by air, you’ve used software he wrote.</p>
<p>I had a chem teacher in high school who held a number of patents for products we all use even now. She left the research world to teach high school kids in a small city in a small New England state-who the heck knows what she was like at 17??</p>
<p>Oh, and the third-ranked kid in my graduating HS class who got in everywhere she applied and was one of those kids we expected to read about in the NYT someday…got married during winter break and had her baby a week after graduation. Never even went to college. I wonder if SHE was somebody’s “optimal match”?</p>
<p>There IS NO “OPTIMAL MATCH”. People who really think there is are maybe a little too full of themselves in thinking they have it all figured out.</p>
<p>A policeman married to a nurse?? Oh please, the offspring of such bourgeois people shouldn’t be allowed anywhere NEAR the gates of an elite college. They might soil the place with their inferior genetics! It’s time to rate parents on their accomplishments and add that into the admissions mix. Maybe call it the PAT (parent achievement test). </p>
<p>Why are you so insistent on bring class-bound, Beliavsky? What did the average person ever do to you to despise them so?</p>
<p>" For a student who is near the top of the MIT group, do you think that the education MIT offers is better than that at a strong state flagship, or no different? For a student in the middle of the MIT group? For a student in the bottom 10% of the MIT group, who is lucky (or maybe unlucky) to be there?"</p>
<p>Probably better on all counts. (Substitute any elite college and the same likely holds true.) So? That doesn’t obligate MIT to admit any of 'em. MIT does not “owe” any bright student an auto admit.</p>
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<p>Admittedly, just a nitpick. </p>
<p>However, the term bourgeois is misapplied in this case. Bourgeois are the class which own the means of production such as large factories or businesses whether in whole or a substantial interest in a group such as a partnership type arrangement. Petit-bourgeois are small business owners. </p>
<p>While some history books do state they are middle-class…this was in the context of a time and place when monarchs and the aristocracy were considered the actual upper-classes with overwhelming political and social power.</p>
<p>Unless the nurse or police officer own the very business from which they perform their jobs, they’re actually part of the working-class proletariat under traditional class terms of the 19th/20th centuries and especially in Marxist and most Marxist related analysis. </p>
<p>/End recall of notes from Marxist theory seminar taken to fulfill poli-sci minor requirements. :)</p>
<p>@beliavsky- Could you be more elitist if you wanted to? I am a glorified bookkeeper/accountant and my ex-husband was an electrician. Amazingly, when we procreated, we managed to produce a PG son. No Nobel Laureate in sight, but we had a son who read at 3, was a Nova devotee at four etc… I think you get the picture. I have no doubt that even with his “inferior” genes, my son will be successful wherever he goes.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, I’m going to take a wild guess that your life has been pretty terrific until now, based on what you post.</p>
<p>If you were ever diagnosed with a usually fatal illness, you quickly figure out which physicians in that field have the most experience treating your illness with the best results- near term and long term. If your spouse were ever in a terrible accident, you pull strings to get him/her airlifted to a major trauma center with the most and worst trauma cases in the region. And god forbid, if your child were diagnosed with virtually anything more serious than flu, even one of the “usually treatable” childhood cancers, you would be on the phone for the next 24 hours researching outcomes and protocols and clinical trials.</p>
<p>At no point would the doctors class rank even enter into your calculation. You would look for someone who specializes in that very problem- and that as a result of geography, reputation, and outcomes, was being referred more and more of those cases by his or her peers.</p>
<p>You should be very thankful that you have never had the experience of being given 48 hours to select the physician who is going to treat your child-- or spouse-- or you-- and potentially alter the rest of your life. But I can assure you, class rank does not enter into the calculation. And I know at least one leading oncologist who got his very last choice of residency (which suggests poor class rank) and somehow he has managed to transcend what you believe to be a poor start to his medical career.</p>
<p>Really- where do you come up with this stuff?</p>
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<p>Humm, how about a policeman married to a bank teller? </p>
<p>Check this link and navigate to Page 215 via the Search Inside. </p>
<p>[What</a> It Really Takes to Get Into Ivy League and Other Highly Selective Colleges: Chuck Hughes: 0639785382119: Amazon.com: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Really-League-Highly-Selective-Colleges/dp/007141259X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361819938&sr=1-1&keywords=hughes+admission#reader_007141259X]What”>http://www.amazon.com/Really-League-Highly-Selective-Colleges/dp/007141259X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361819938&sr=1-1&keywords=hughes+admission#reader_007141259X)</p>
<p>The notes are interesting:</p>
<p>NCBC is appealing. And that BC means Blue collar at Harvard.
Police officer father adds a background tip! </p>
<p>PS Kelly, the girl in the example was accepted at Harvard … if inquiring minds want to know.</p>
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<p>But they would be well paid members of the working-class proletariat. Career police officers and nurses who are at the age of having kids who are high school seniors or college freshmen are paid very well (95+ percentile household income for the two put together), at least in some areas.</p>
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<p>While Beliavsky is severely overstating the effects of med school class rank in determining whether someone becomes a competent doctor or not, the above is also a bit of a overstatement according to some Med school roommate and other MD friends. They include a bunch who are Harvard MDs…one of whom is a cardiologist who graduated near the top of his med school class. </p>
<p>Med school has become so hard to get admitted into and to finish as curriculum is pretty standardized that someone who’s bottom at Harvard Med isn’t likely to be top at some other med school. </p>
<p>Incidentally, they’ve also said while even Harvard Med students who graduate at the very bottom of the class are also called doctors, such med students are likely to called into a meeting with the dean and “strongly advised” to consider positions where they will have little/any contact with patients…such as hospital administration.</p>
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<p>While I can believe that about nurses, police officers salaries really depend on the region they are working in and the fiscal strength of local/regional government. </p>
<p>I’ve read of police officer or firefighter salaries in some areas where they’re getting as little as $40-60k/year at the same career stage you’ve mentioned due to budget issues with the government and poor economy of the region.</p>
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- speeding ticket
- gluteus maximus injection</p>
<p>^^ I’m calling baloney, Cobrat. You do not know what you are talking about.</p>
<p>The bottom rankng physician applies, like the rest of her graduating class, to a residency program, completes the required work for that residency program, takes her national board exams, parts one and two, and upon successfully passing those exams is then board certified in a specialty. </p>
<p>Med students may be guided to apply to residencies that match their strengths, their interests, their professional goals.</p>
<p>No bottom ranking graduate of an American medical school, has ever been counseled by anyone to become a hospital administrator, a position for which a medical degree is completely irrelevant.</p>
<p>“Incidentally, they’ve also said while even Harvard Med students who graduate at the very bottom of the class are also called doctors, such med students are likely to called into a meeting with the dean and “strongly advised” to consider positions where they will have little/any contact with patients…such as hospital administration.”</p>
<p>I don’t believe that for an instant. This is another one of those I-think-I-heard-this-from-a-friend and so therefore I-will-treat-it-as-absolute-truth stories. Some of us know the medical world FAR better than you do. The med school student at the bottom of the class goes through residency like everyone else. He doesn’t get “counseled to be a hospital admin.”</p>
<p>the second part of that joke is…</p>
<p>What do you call the guy/girl who graduates last in their Law School class?</p>
<p>… Unemployed</p>
<p>just for completeness sake</p>
<p>According to [USMLE</a> score - Wikipedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USMLE_score]USMLE”>USMLE score - Wikipedia) , the passing score on the USMLE is 188 out of 300. The 188 scorer knows only a little more than the 178 scorer, but the latter is not allowed to get a license unless he can get a higher score upon retesting. I think there is a much larger difference in medical knowledge between the 288 scorer and the 188 scorer than between the 188 and the 178 and would rather be seen by the 288 scorer, other things being equal, if such data were made available. There is more to being a good doctor than knowing a lot about medicine, but there is no reason to believe that the other important qualities are negatively correlated with USMLE scores.</p>
<p>People (and legislators) like binary classifications, such as doctor or non-doctor, but such classifications are less informative than the underlying data, in this case USMLE scores and medical school GPAs.</p>
<p>Looking at the CC thread <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/1067464-being-competitive-residency.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/1067464-being-competitive-residency.html</a> , it appears that medical school grades and USMLE 1 scores <em>do</em> matter when applying for residencies, as one would expect. If residency programs think such measures help identify who will be good doctors, why should not patients?</p>
<p>Are you on the spectrum, Beliavsky? I ask because you seem to perseverate on the notion that everything is quantifiable and measurable according to standardized tests.</p>