Intelligence factor?

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Yadster101

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In lieu of the recent "med schools hard" threads, I got to thinking about how most people agree that med school sucks. I started browsing through a few mdapps profiles/post histories and found that there seemed to be little correlation between MCATs/GPAs and med school struggles. I would think that the guy going to Pritzker that had a 40 something MCAT would have a much easier time compared to someone attending a DO school that studied for months to pull of a 26. Turns out both groups are in the bottom half of their classes and both struggled at some point just to pass a class.

Now obvs. the ranking within the class for the Pritzker dude can probably be attributed to the higher caliber of students at his school. But if all med schools teach the same (similar?) material, then how have both struggled just to pass at one time or another? I know there are countless other variables to account for here, but still shouldn't innate ability play some factor in how hard one finds med school to be?

I based this comparison on a popular SDN poster going to Pritzker and a few DO posters but this comparison can be made with many different students. Even in a single school you can have people that got 35+ MCATs that seem to be struggling just as much as their peers that got 28's. Am I missing something?
 
Talent means fairly little without hard work to back it up. Almost everyone, even those who used to coast by with their innate intelligence, is going to have to work hard in medical school to be even above average. Sometimes, people who had it easy up until medical school have a harder time adapting.

But really, too many factors to read too much into it. Additionally, there is data out there about how the current items used to decide med school admissions (MCAT, GPA, interviews) predict performance relatively poorly, so I don't this phenomenon you've observed is something worth worrying about too much.
 
Smartness isn't measured by how much you know, but how fast you learn. If a smart person doesn't put time in medical school, they are going to have a tough time. I know people who know a ton of medicine, but does that make them geniuses? no. So its what you know that determines how you do in medical school.

The guy with the 28 prolly is working his butt of cuz he knows he barely made it to med school and he's got to step it up.
 
No matter what anyone says, a lot of how successful a person is in med school depends on how much time they put into it. Yes, innate intelligence and "high yield" study strategies play a role, but in general the people who score very well put in way more time studying. This gets difficult because at this age, people have other priorities to worry about (marriages, children, big life events, etc) that can get in the way of studying. Someone struggling with a class or barely passing is usually less of a problem with intelligence, and more an issue of not being able to put in the required time for studying, for whatever reason.
 
cs24 said:
Talent means fairly little without hard work to back it up. Almost everyone, even those who used to coast by with their innate intelligence, is going to have to work hard in medical school to be even above average. Sometimes, people who had it easy up until medical school have a harder time adapting.

But really, too many factors to read too much into it. Additionally, there is data out there about how the current items used to decide med school admissions (MCAT, GPA, interviews) predict performance relatively poorly, so I don't this phenomenon you've observed is something worth worrying about too much.
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I agree. There are a LOT of factors involved. MCAT and GPA are just metrics (the latter of which can be heavily gamed). The metrics that we have currently MCAT, GPA, Undergrad institution, Personal Statement, Letters of recommendation aren't that great predictors of total med school performance. We have better ones for the first 2 years, but as is well known, that's not all of med school.

That's why many schools have now incorporated MMI.
 
chajjohnson said:
No matter what anyone says, a lot of how successful a person is in med school depends on how much time they put into it. Yes, innate intelligence and "high yield" study strategies play a role, but in general the people who score very well put in way more time studying. This gets difficult because at this age, people have other priorities to worry about (marriages, children, big life events, etc) that can get in the way of studying. Someone struggling with a class or barely passing is usually less of a problem with intelligence, and more an issue of not being able to put in the required time for studying, for whatever reason.
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This is more the case with non-traditionals who have already accomplished these things vs. your fresh 22 year old coming straight out of undergrad, who is still initially willing to delay gratification.
 
DermViser said:
This is more the case with non-traditionals who have already accomplished these things vs. your fresh 22 year old coming straight out of undergrad, who is still initially willing to delay gratification.
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Not necessarily true. I know probably half of my friends in med school are <25 y/o and are either married, just got married, or are planning to get married. I myself got married during M1 (trad student). It is honestly a huge time commitment to get married and its the beginning of a relationship... just like medical school, if you don't put in the time and effort its gunna feel bad man.
 
Med school is a different ball game from any college class. Where in college it doesn't take much just to pass, even in a hard science class to get a D really you could study the night before and at least just pass.

However, in med because you can't study everything to the level of detail necessary cause there is just too much material and not enough time you could fail just for having gone into to much detail on neuro and not enough on msk etc. I can definitely now see how the Harvards and Yales have moved to a pass/fail grading system. Once you reach a certain level of difficulty in subject matter anything above a pass is going to be due to a combination of some intellect and sheer luck. I would say passing a med exam is equivalent to getting a B in college.
 
Passing classes in med school is no joke and bottom half of pritzker is still pritzker. I would take them over the top half of a do school any day. Professors expect more out of better students.
 
pathologyDO said:
Not necessarily true. I know probably half of my friends in med school are <25 y/o and are either married, just got married, or are planning to get married. I myself got married during M1 (trad student). It is honestly a huge time commitment to get married and its the beginning of a relationship... just like medical school, if you don't put in the time and effort its gunna feel bad man.
Click to expand...

Is marriage for everyone? Or let me put it this way. Should everyone get married?
 
chajjohnson said:
No matter what anyone says, a lot of how successful a person is in med school depends on how much time they put into it. Yes, innate intelligence and "high yield" study strategies play a role, but in general the people who score very well put in way more time studying. This gets difficult because at this age, people have other priorities to worry about (marriages, children, big life events, etc) that can get in the way of studying. Someone struggling with a class or barely passing is usually less of a problem with intelligence, and more an issue of not being able to put in the required time for studying, for whatever reason.
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Agree 100% ... I know 2 people in my class who got accepted from the alternate list because of low MCAT sore and they are in the top quartile. These 2 study like there is no tomorrow...

I even tried that theory... When I spend 8+ hours studying everyday, I am usually on the first quartile and very high on the second, but once I go to my regular 4-5 hours, 3rd and 4th quartile become common place...
 
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5:45: "I was getting bad grades... I did quite poorly in Anatomy at first". He then goes on to talk about his study methods.

This guy is a legit prodigy with an IQ seen in nearly one in a billion people. He went to med school at Pritzker. It's not an exaggeration to say that he's probably the smartest person in the world wearing the title of "doctor". Do you think he just "coasted" by? No. Intelligence may mean you may not have to work as hard to get the same results, but medical school is hard work no matter how smart you are. There is just a lot to learn, period. Everybody who's gotten to that point is relatively adept and the best of the best relative to the general student population at memorizing info and spitting it back out, taking tests and thinking critically. The people who I know who aren't that smart but worked incredibly hard did very well. The people I know who are smart and worked hard (but not as hard) did very well. The people I know who are both incredibly smart AND worked incredibly hard did even better (270+ etc). It's worth noting that there aren't many of those people. The student I'm thinking of legitimately "got" stuff faster than others, and you could tell he was reasoning through and really knew his **** when he spoke. With other students who worked hard but aren't people I'd consider extremely intelligent, you can tell they just read 24-7 and rattled off **** they'd read when asked a question, but weren't really reasoning their way to the conclusions. When combined with a strong personality and good work ethic, these types of people can go very far in med school (ie all honors rotations, good steps, any specialty they want).

Also, to stir the pot a little bit, I don't think it's outlandish to say, that at the very least, the average MD school has better students than the average DO school. That information is statistically supported in matriculation stats published for respective schools. It's not even close when it comes to the top MD schools vs any DO school; the quality of people entering Harvard are simply a cut (or multiple cuts) above a DO applicant. Once you're in however, like I said, you don't necessarily need to be smart to do well. You just need to work hard, period.
 
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Like the above poster mentioned, it's just work ethic and drive most of the time. Additionally, you can expect people who go to more prestigious schools to have more. I don't think you'll have people going to medical school and all of a sudden they completely change their work ethic. I would tend to think that DO schools do not instill that type of "do your best" mentality. It has little to do with innate intelligence. That's just my opinion though.
 
Intelligence insofar as doing well on exams? It's mostly memorization, at least in MS1. If you can memorize literally every single slide, you'll do well on exams.
 
circulus vitios said:
Intelligence insofar as doing well on exams? It's mostly memorization, at least in MS1. If you can memorize literally every single slide, you'll do well on exams.
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i don't understand why you're constantly surprised by the fact that you're supposed to know things
 
Psai said:
i don't understand why you're constantly surprised by the fact that you're supposed to know things
Click to expand...
Because the way they cherry pick exam topics is thoroughly ******ed e.g. out of like 400 slides of embryology lectures, the professor decided to focus on transcription factors while ignoring the majority of the actual developmental processes. If I knew which topics were going to be emphasized, I could do so much better. But instead it's a game of 'lol memorize 1500 slides, of which 200 will be testable material.'
 
circulus vitios said:
Because the way they cherry pick exam topics is thoroughly ******ed e.g. out of like 400 slides of embryology lectures, the professor decided to focus on transcription factors while ignoring the majority of the actual developmental processes. If I knew which topics were going to be emphasized, I could do so much better. But instead it's a game of 'lol memorize 1500 slides, of which 200 will be testable material.'
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It's probably to make sure you actually study everything presented.
 
circulus vitios said:
Because the way they cherry pick exam topics is thoroughly ******ed e.g. out of like 400 slides of embryology lectures, the professor decided to focus on transcription factors while ignoring the majority of the actual developmental processes. If I knew which topics were going to be emphasized, I could do so much better. But instead it's a game of 'lol memorize 1500 slides, of which 200 will be testable material.'
Click to expand...

That is spot on. I studied like crazy for my last exam from the very start of the block...I never took a single day off. I put in at least 8 hrs/day on the weekends and as much as I possibly could outside of class/lab time during weekdays. And yet I was blown away by the questions they asked on my last exam because much of it was NOT emphasized during lectures and many of the questions were unclear/poorly worded. I felt like I was taking the wrong exam or something.
 
They expect you to understand the major processes, why would they test on it extensively?
In clinic, you'll see the most common things because that's the nature of clinic. That's why they put more rare things on tests so that you'll know about it and hopefully be ready when it comes up
 
Psai said:
They expect you to understand the major processes, why would they test on it extensively?
In clinic, you'll see the most common things because that's the nature of clinic. That's why they put more rare things on tests so that you'll know about it and hopefully be ready when it comes up
Click to expand...
And here I thought tests were supposed to assess knowledge and understanding.
 
Brainydaps said:
Is marriage for everyone? Or let me put it this way. Should everyone get married?
Click to expand...

I didn't say that nor did I even imply that. I stated what I haver observed about marriage in medical school, where there a plenty of trad students that are married or are getting married
 
Psai said:
They expect you to understand the major processes, why would they test on it extensively?
In clinic, you'll see the most common things because that's the nature of clinic. That's why they put more rare things on tests so that you'll know about it and hopefully be ready when it comes up
Click to expand...

Let's test them primarily on all the stuff we didn't emphasize or only mentioned in passing or didn't mention at all to see if they learned that, but who gives a **** if they actually know the material that we spent the most time on in lecture. Sounds logical. 👍
 
unspokentruth said:
Let's test them primarily on all the stuff we didn't emphasize or only mentioned in passing or didn't mention at all to see if they learned that, but who gives a **** if they actually know the material that we spent the most time on in lecture. Sounds logical. 👍
Click to expand...

Cool story bro, welcome to med school. We've all been through it. And keep in mind there are people who consistently manage to destroy exams. Btw, those people are going to do better than you on Step 1 and clinicals, and not for some strange, unknown reason.
 
They are testing you on everything kids. You're just focusing on the unexpected things that pop up which is not that often. You should know as much as possible. The little details are what separates the good students from the bad. The good students know the big picture and the little details. The bad students have a weak understanding of the big picture and don't know the little details. Then they constantly whine and moan about it as if it's someone else's fault that they can't keep up. Also, you're in M1. It's all little details so stop crying about it and go study
 
Average IQ for MD graduates is ~125, which is close to 2 standard deviations over the general population. Most everyone in your class will be pretty smart by any standard. As @Priapism4tooLong said earlier, intelligence mostly affects how quickly you assimilate new information and integrate it into your knowledge base. Someone that's more intelligent can generally study less and master a subject at the same level or beyond that of someone who is less intelligent. There are all sorts of exceptions: some people are naturally inclined to anatomy-type learning over physio, some people are more curious or naturally inquisitive about certain subjects more than others, etc. In the aggregate though, I think most difference in academic achievement and overall mastery of the material, which is not necessarily reflected in class rank, will come down to hours spent studying as well as overall efficiency more so than raw intelligence simply because the intellectual bar is already so high.
 
Yadster101 said:
In lieu of the recent "med schools hard" threads, I got to thinking about how most people agree that med school sucks. I started browsing through a few mdapps profiles/post histories and found that there seemed to be little correlation between MCATs/GPAs and med school struggles. I would think that the guy going to Pritzker that had a 40 something MCAT would have a much easier time compared to someone attending a DO school that studied for months to pull of a 26. Turns out both groups are in the bottom half of their classes and both struggled at some point just to pass a class.

Now obvs. the ranking within the class for the Pritzker dude can probably be attributed to the higher caliber of students at his school. But if all med schools teach the same (similar?) material, then how have both struggled just to pass at one time or another? I know there are countless other variables to account for here, but still shouldn't innate ability play some factor in how hard one finds med school to be?

I based this comparison on a popular SDN poster going to Pritzker and a few DO posters but this comparison can be made with many different students. Even in a single school you can have people that got 35+ MCATs that seem to be struggling just as much as their peers that got 28's. Am I missing something?
Click to expand...


I'll tell you why both students at the bottom of both programs probably struggle - they arent putting in the effort.

The fact of the matter is that the whole path to becoming a physician is heavily based on things like hard work, dedication, and being a good student (ienot necessarily an exceedingly smart student).

Medical school and beyond does involve vast amounts of information, but you sure as hell dont need to be a genius/near genius to understand the stuff. What you do need to be is a diligent worker to get through med school and residency - you need to go HARD as opposed to some PhD who truly pushes the boundaries of science albeit at a leisurely pace. You need to have a certain intelligence level to be able to put all that information together to be able to assess a real person who walks through the door in your office or hospital, but even that is drilled into you during years of residency.

Even test like the MCAT isnt that big an indicator of "intelligence"

Let's be real, there's a good chance that the guy who got a 40 studied multiple times harder than the guy who got a 28. MCAT is not an IQ test and i bet that if you take a bunch of random US physicans, and have them study for it equally, you'd see a pretty even set of scores.

That said, there are probably a few real geniuses in medical school who dont find learning all the material much of a challenge.
 
circulus vitios said:
And here I thought tests were supposed to assess knowledge and understanding.
Click to expand...

Sure, the exams do this. You may be neglecting the fact that a good portion of the test questions are meant to bring out the spread in students' knowledge and understanding. You will eventually learn what is testable and what is not, but you need to get used to having tests where it is impossible to know all the answers. After all, in MS3, there is a paucity of lectures and, yet, every single shelf tests you on a massive spread of material which you are expected to know. Sure, putting in the time to do your reading helps with the shelf exams, but it takes a certain amount of intelligence/mental talent/whatever to be able to pull out all that disparate knowledge and apply it when you haven't necessarily even seen it in the last month/3 months/6 months.
 
You are applying SAT distribution logic, and it just doesn't work any more. I am willing to bet that there is not much of a spread in intelligence in medical school. There are a few who get things amazingly quickly, but most high performers are thorough and deliberate. There are few who honestly have problems with logic and reasoning and are in over their head; the rest of low performers are not studying the requisite amount of time.
 
pre med 2014 said:
I can definitely now see how the Harvards and Yales have moved to a pass/fail grading system. Once you reach a certain level of difficulty in subject matter anything above a pass is going to be due to a combination of some intellect and sheer luck. I would say passing a med exam is equivalent to getting a B in college.
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I am REALLY curious to know what you guys think about this. Im not sure about the B thing but, is getting an A in a class like orgo equivalent in difficulty to passing a med school class??
 
pre med 2014 said:
No it's more like getting a B in orgo
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But then what about the many posters on sdn that have remediated a class but got 3.9+ GPAs in college? Are you saying that they didn't work as hard in med school as they did in undergrad orgo?
 
Medical school is nothing like undergrad. It's about having the tenacity to power through and memorize 200-300 slides of material every day.
 
Yadster101 said:
But then what about the many posters on sdn that have remediated a class but got 3.9+ GPAs in college? Are you saying that they didn't work as hard in med school as they did in undergrad orgo?
Click to expand...

I would say that those people are anomalies on the Internet. With a 3.9gpa I suppose you could still fail a med exam but unlikely to fail out of med school and I'm sure very few 3.9ers struggle to pass exams. That being said I think it simply comes down to the bar being raised of how much you need to know to pass.

Even for the usmle you need 70% of the questions right just to pass. That's not a joke, you have to study a lot just for that. And then anything above that is going to be attributable to intellect, luck and test taking talent. Which are good qualities to have as a doctor but at this level of material it's not as simple as saying studying hard means you'll do good. In college studying hard means you can get that A, but in medicine if you work hard it's probably at least enough just to pass. After that it's all about how much of your life and sacrifices you are willing to make to get into the competitive scores.
 
Yadster101 said:
In lieu of the recent "med schools hard" threads, I got to thinking about how most people agree that med school sucks. I started browsing through a few mdapps profiles/post histories and found that there seemed to be little correlation between MCATs/GPAs and med school struggles. I would think that the guy going to Pritzker that had a 40 something MCAT would have a much easier time compared to someone attending a DO school that studied for months to pull of a 26. Turns out both groups are in the bottom half of their classes and both struggled at some point just to pass a class.

Now obvs. the ranking within the class for the Pritzker dude can probably be attributed to the higher caliber of students at his school. But if all med schools teach the same (similar?) material, then how have both struggled just to pass at one time or another? I know there are countless other variables to account for here, but still shouldn't innate ability play some factor in how hard one finds med school to be?

I based this comparison on a popular SDN poster going to Pritzker and a few DO posters but this comparison can be made with many different students. Even in a single school you can have people that got 35+ MCATs that seem to be struggling just as much as their peers that got 28's. Am I missing something?
Click to expand...



You don't need to be smart to succeed in med school, you don't even need to be a decent person, all you need to get in really is a great MCAT, and all you need to succeed year after year, is the discipline to study
 
Yadster101 said:
Well I know someone who had a 3.9ish GPA that remediated anatomy. Also didn't @NickNaylor remediate anatomy or something even though he had a 40MCAT and 4.0?
Click to expand...

many posters on sdn like no one plus a single anecdotal story about someone you know who you aren't even sure if they had a 3.9 gpa

cool story bro
 
Yadster101 said:
my bad but I watched the sdn chat vid a while ago and I remember you saying something about remediating a class your first or second year?
Click to expand...

No, I never said that because I never remediated a class.
 
Psai said:
many posters on sdn like no one plus a single anecdotal story about someone you know who you aren't even sure if they had a 3.9 gpa

cool story bro
Click to expand...

I just searched remediation and got this

1) @SilverItchyMous goes to WashU and he seems to have repeated his first year (Im assuming he must have done well to get into WashU but there is a small possibility he had <3.8 <34
2) http://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/failed-class-and-failed-remediation.974532/
This guy had a 35 MCAT, albeit a low gpa
3) The guy I knew had a >3.9 and a 30 MCAT
 
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