On Thursday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about the results of racial preferences in higher education.
The article reports:
Up to half of UCLA medical students now fail basic tests of medical competence. Whistleblowers say affirmative action, illegal in California since 1996, is to blame.
Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year. Of those, it accepted just 173 students in the 2023 admissions cycle, a record-low acceptance rate of 1.3 percent. The median matriculant took difficult science courses in college, earned a 3.8 GPA, and scored in the 88th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).
The article notes:
As the demographics of UCLA have changed, the number of students failing their shelf exams has soared, trends professors at the medical school say are connected.
Between 2020, the year Lucero assumed her post, and 2023, when the first classes she admitted were taking their shelf exams, the failure rate rose dramatically across all subjects, in some cases increasing tenfold relative to the 2020 baseline, per internal data obtained by the Free Beacon.
“UCLA still produces some very good graduates,” one professor said. “But a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.”
The collapse in qualifications has been compounded by UCLA’s decision, in 2020, to condense its preclinical curriculum from two years to one in order to add more time for research and community service. 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. They spend an additional seven hours a week in “Foundations of Practice,” which includes units on “interpersonal communication skills” and, according to one medical student, basically “tells us how to be a good person.” The two courses eat up time that could be spent on physiology or anatomy, professors say, and leave struggling students with fewer hours to learn the basics.
“This has been a colossal failure,” one professor posted in April on a forum for medical school applicants. “The new curriculum is not working and the students are grossly unprepared for clinical rotations.”
Nearly a fourth of UCLA medical students in the class of 2025 have failed three or more shelf exams, data from the school show, forcing some students to repeat classes and persuading others to postpone a different test, the Step 2 licensing exam, that is typically taken in the third year of medical school and is a prerequisite for most residency programs.
Forgetting your actual mission can lead to getting lost on the road to success. The first problem we need to look at is to figure out why minority children are not getting the basic educational foundation from kindergarten to high school that they need to be successful in medical school–is it cultural or a failure of our schools? The second thing we need to look at is the fact that the medical school has lost its focus. A medical school needs to train doctors to practice medicine. Social justice and racial equality are fine, but if the doctor doesn’t know how to solve a problem, it really doesn’t matter what race the patient is.
We all need to strive for equality, but let’s not lose standards and practical knowledge in the process.
