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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25613 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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I look at the charts and see a gigantic increase in fail rates from 2020 to 2023, followed by what appears to be a decrease in fail rate in 2024 (but still massively above the previous baseline).

In honesty, we can never know what these tests look like year to year. Perhaps they gave everyone an A during the Covid years. Perhaps they dumbed down the test in 2024 so more people would pass.

We'll never have the objective data we need, and the powers that be want it that way. I agree that surreptiously-taken screenshots is no proof, but it's not like UCLA is going to publish data that shows they are graduating incompetents.

Who knows, maybe despite lower MCAT scores black doctors are just as good because they compensate in other ways. Are you willing to bet your life on it?

Haven’t we already done this experiment and it failed miserably. Killer King hospital did exists and people tried not to go there.

Wow, I did not know about that. Yikes. Poor Martin Luther King getting all the worst stuff named after him.

So basically, those who supported the practice of associating his name with the bad part of town might as well have been the, er, MLKKK.

Activist goals (the stated ones, anyway) would have been better served by just trying to get more high-human-capital into medicine. But that’s a bridge too far.

Sure, it definitely seems like there's been an increase in failure rates, but why are the charts inconsistent about failure rates in the same year? It also seems weird to blame black doctors specifically. According to the chart on racial admission data in the article black enrollment over the 2019-2022 time period (the article doesn't have 2023 or 2024) was essentially flat (2212% to 2413%). Unless there is some huge un-shown spike in black enrollment in the last two years it seems hard to see how having a more-black student body is responsible for the increase in failure rates.

ETA:

After reading the article a bit more closely I realized I was interpreting the demographic change chart incorrectly in the context of the tests. Medical school takes four years and the shelf exam test scores in the charts are coming in the third of that four years. So the 22-23 class that has the horrible scores is actually the 2021 demographics and the 23-24 class with the improved scores is the 2022 demographics. We don't have test scores for the last two bars on the demographic chart because they haven't taken the tests in question yet. So the improved 23-24 test scores were achieved with a demographic makeup that is less Asian and more black than the worse 22-23 test scores.

ETA 2:

As Joyful points out below they removed a year of coursework, so this is happening in their second year, so the 2022 demographics are the 2023-2024 test year.

ETA 3:

Confusing numbers for percentages. Updated.

Most likely UCLA is experiencing much more trouble attracting the limited pool of black students with good test scores now that every other school in the country is aggressively poaching them.

Morehouse college has the same problem despite going from 100% black to 100% Black

The immediately visible effects of AA first show up at the lowest ranked schools and work their way up. When Harvard takes the 1050 SAT guy who would have gone to Evergreen State, Evergreen has to settle for the guy who learned to write his name in his juvie GED program.

Combined with the rise of Grade-Inflation Studies degrees and endless free money, it's the perfect cover for everyone who matters choosing to ignore the consequences.

As a matter of simple mathematics, assuming the first chart with the > 50% fail rates is correct, this cannot be the whole story. In the Family Medicine category failure rates go from around 10% in 21-22 to around 50% in 22-23%. Even if no black students had been failing in 21-22 and every black student failed in 22-23 that would not be enough of a change to explain this difference, unless the fraction of students who are black also doubled.

nd 2+ years studying to get the highest possible score on an exam they get to take one time so you had to be sure. Now they just try to pass. Now a lot of that exam was stuff that "doesn't really matter" (ex: biochem pathways) but the incentive shift was absolutely massive.

The article mentions that they also changed the curriculum from two years of coursework to one.

Not sure what they are talking about specifically (the linked data was for clinical "shelf" exams and the course length change is preclinical) but a number of higher tier schools started to condense the traditionally two year preclinical curriculum into a year and a half or so (the spared time was used elsewhere).

This transition predates making Step-1 P/F, COVID, and recent social justice advances, but not every school is picking it up at the same time. They may also start to roll it back because it can be very rough on students.

A number of massive changes have hit medical education all at once, some of which are quality suppressing some are not.

Wait, 24% of UCLA med school admittees are black !?

Blacks are 14% of the national population, and like 6% of California's population. What is going here? Those numbers can't be right, can they?

Those aren't percentages; they're numbers.

Appreciate the correction, updated my post with the correct numbers.

Welcome to why Affirmative Action makes Asians and Whites furious

If you read the article linked in the Twitter post, you'd see that Asian enrollment dropped by about 1/3 and Hispanic enrollment went up about 50%. Black enrollment seems to have mostly held steady.

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