Described by who? The attending? Or the person's classmates? I'm not concerned with this specific event, but it seems like its easy to use things like this after the fact as an excuse when really this is a condemnation of the teachers who just kept handing the person along and passing them. Phoning it in for a year as a 3rd year under the eyes of schools' faculty should shut the door to 4th year. They would probably have gone forward with it anyway (parity?), but we're going to have to take a stupidly expensive standardized patient board after we've already spent all of 3rd year and the better part of 4th year interacting doing rotations. Wouldn't it be nice to think that somewhere along the way someone would have said "you have terrible patient interactions" or "you are woefully inept at taking a history". Rant summary: sometimes it is immediately clear that someone will never be a doctor. Getting cut early is a kindness. Saying after the fact - "I always knew this would happen" reflects worse on the teacher than the student.
