Agreed. It pushes out people who can bring a valuable perspective to medicine such as engineers.
+1. There wasn't anything wrong with the current MCAT. It was just that certain people within AAMC decided that it would be a good idea to throw everything possible at Pre-Meds to make sure that they were "broader-educated" and to make the test "more relevant" - whatever that means.
It probably would have been cheaper anyways just for med schools to revise their curriculum requirements to include Biochem, Sociology and Psych as required courses, but apparently that would have been too convenient and made too much sense. Grades for those courses would indicate mastery of that material, and the MCAT could remain in its current form as an analytical rather than comprehensive knowledge instrument for assessing applicants.
And a larger question is "Are current physicians out of touch with the general population and therefore ineffective?". Arguably not - or at least from the efficacy of the doctors I see in my local ER. I don't think that these doctors know the definition of "class conflict theory" or "cognitive dissonance". But yet their knowledge of the patient population and of how people work has been acquired through practice rather than by sitting in a classroom and acquiring low yield knowledge.
Funny thing is that pretty much everyone on the test revision committee is composed of
academics who as we know are pretty much out of touch with the reality of medical practice. They aren't the ones who are actually providing healthcare to the bulk of the population, or at the
spearhead of actually positive medical reform.
In fact, this whole idea of producing more "well-rounded" doctors is based on the premise that the system currently produces a bunch of socially-inept individuals, and that even current doctors share this same problem. This may be the case, but having them stick even longer in the classroom and study even more for the test isn't going to be a solution for this - the best course of action is to actually get them OUT of the classroom and into the real world.
And it seems that the committee of "geniuses" who devised the new test seem to have drank the
doctor-bashing Kool-Aid.
Weirdly enough, the timing of the new MCAT isn't a coincidence: The recently established Obamacare seeks to transfer patient responsibility to the physician.
What does this mean?
It means making physicans more "patient-friendly" by making them be more "empathetic". Patient issues are not the problems of the patient but rather "class" and "environmental issues". Essentially, individual responsibility is abrogated and any problems are the physican's problems.
The illustration below is a good indicator of the kind of medicine that physicians will be required to practice in the future by governmental decree:
What better way to indoctrinate young doctors into the cult of Obamacare by arbitrarily forcing them through sociology and psychology, which have NO relevance to clinical efficacy?
So if revisions couldn't have been prevented, what could have been done instead?
Add a section over finance/business related stuff. Seriously. The majority of doctors have no financial sense, and undergrad is the perfect place to build up that base.
Finally, to answer the question of Dr. Darrell G. Kirch, the President of the AAMC:
Hopefully physicians - unlike the ones who came up with the 2015 MCAT - not isolated in Ivory Towers and who are out of touch with the realities of the real world. Ironically, this is the very outcome that the test writers were trying to avoid by introducing the new sections. Yet they seem to have taken no steps to fix their own condition. As the old adage goes, "Physician heal thyself".
After all, it was this mindset that led to the AMA endorsing Obamacare.
