DoctorPardi said:
I think this is too harsh. I am very adamantly opposed to cheating and academic dishonesty, but what we're talking about here is possibly seriously limiting his chances at getting into medical school because of a ******* mistake he made his first year in college.
No, I'm sorry, but you are still missing my point. My response was not addressing the academic dishonesty/******* mistake from college. I was harsh because of what he is trying to do NOW. All applicants have an affirmative duty to provide complete disclosure to AMCAS. In other words, this is one of the few times when it is not good enough to not do something bad; he has a duty to volunteer information, regardless of whether or not it shows up on his transcript.
I imagine you're thinking, "So what? If it's not on his TX, well, no harm, no foul! Why shoot himself in the foot if he doesn't have to?"
The answer is that he does have to disclose the academic misconduct because this is NOT just between him and his undergraduate school. If the adcoms know about the former misconduct and admit him becuase they see growth, fantastic. But how can they see that growth if he never discloses what happened and what he learned from it?
Let me give you a hypothetical situation: let's say you or me or the OP are practicing medicine 10 years from now and we screw up in surgery or prescribe the wrong med because we didn't check the patient's allergy history. No one else saw what we did; there are no witnesses to our misconduct. But you know what you did wrong. Do you just keep your mouth shut and refuse to accept responsability?
The AMCAS process is a major pain in the ass. Granted. But some of those rules are there for a reason, and I think this is an important one. Med schools are not looking for perfect applicants who have never made a dumb mistake -- those people don't exist. But they are entitled to demand that applicants accept responsability for their mistakes and show a willingness to (1) learn from the past, and (2) accept responsability by acknowledging what they did wrong EVEN WHEN THERE IS NO OFFICIAL RECORD THEREOF.
DoctorPardi said:
I know too many people who have made mistakes their first year in college. Maybe they got a DUI because they were idiots and weren't used to drinking so much and so they drove home. Or maybe they made bad grades their first year because they didn't realize it would be this hard (me). I have been able to pull my grades up and work to make my GPA competitive but it seems like there is nothing he can do.
It is like this, if it were to ask you if you ever commited a felony. You did when you were a juvenile and your records are completely sealed and go away once you're 21 or 25, then are you going to say, "Yes I committed a felony"? He needs to find out how school handles this. If after 2-3 years of good conduct his school expunges the records then it isn't worth mentioning I would say.
I agree that we can not go back into the past to correct our mistakes. We can and should strive to show that our current actions don't repeat those mistakes. He can do something about it now -- he can follow the rules and disclose. It is not up to him or you or me to second-guess AMCAS and decide what is or isn't "worth mentioning."
One of the reasons I left my old profession was the fact that it did a fairly poor job of policing itself. Professional rules of conduct are instituted to ensure quality work and public trust. Every time we ignore that we do so at our own peril. I look at the high standards that doctors hold themselves up to and I want to raise the bar, not lower it.
OK, I'm getting off my soap box now.
