Entry to MBBS: No entry to oldies

Entry to professional courses will now be time-barred . The number of older candidates competing with 18-year-old aspirants has been rising with each passing year.

Medical, dental and engineering aspirants will get a maximum of three chances till they turn 25 years old to step into the professional arena. Reserved-category students will be able to take the exam three times till they are 30.

About 12,000 repeaters took the CET in 2007 and, in 2008, the tribe grew to 13,568. DMER data said the oldest candidate was 38 and at least 100 more aspirants were in their early 30s.

Reminds me of the time when we had a Sardarji who had completed a course in Pharmacy before joining us in MBBS. We called him Uncle, and later learnt that his son was preparing for PMT as well. No more ‘back to school’ or “Main hoon na” situations possible in medical school any more?

Postgraduate entrance examinations likely to be scrapped in Maharashtra

Medical students aspiring for post-graduate courses in Maharashtra will no longer have to appear for an entrance examination. The present Medical Council of India regulations say students can be admitted to post-graduate courses on the basis of an entrance exam conducted by the central government or the state government or on the basis of the MBBS aggregate if a particular state has one medical university.

Maharashtra has 10 government colleges and three civic colleges in Mumbai that offer a host of post-graduate courses. Admission to these colleges is conducted after a post-graduate medical entrance examination using multiple choice questions. The use of MCQs for selection in high stakes examinations has been debated earlier as well.

The Department of Medical Education and Research has mooted a proposal that students’ MBBS marks be considered for admitting them to the master’s programme and the decision is likely to be accepted by the state government.

“The state can go ahead with the proposal from the coming year itself and inform fourth-year students that their final-year marks will be considered for admission to PG courses. Third-year students can be informed that aggregate marks of their third and fourth years will be considered when it’s time for them to join the PG course and so on”

Two years ago, Tamil Nadu scrapped its entrance test and admitted students to medical and engineering colleges based on class-XII marks.

Rajesh Tope, the state medical education minister added:

“We will not scrap the MHT-CET for at least two years as we need to inform aspiring students well in advance.”

While this is a welcome move, I am reminded about the malpractice it used induce in the marking system in MBBS earlier. Students who were no where in the toppers list throughout the course used to strangely appear as toppers in the most sought after clinical branches in the past, when a similar system was in place. With a centralized assessment programme in place by the Maharashtra University of Health Sciences now, most worries should be misplaced.

PeRSSonalized Medicine: Create your own medical journal

Being up-to-date is crucial for medical professionals, but it takes time and effort. Sitting in a library with a few medical papers is not a proper solution any more. Learning to use an RSS reader is not that easy for those who don’t spend much time online.

Check out PeRSSonalized Medicine, a new aggregator of medical news, articles, journals. It is created by Bertalan Meskó, a medical student about to graduate from the University of Debrecen, Medical School and Health Science Center.

PeRSSonalized Medicine is a free tool that lets you select your favourite resources and read the latest news and articles in one personalized place. You can create your own “medical journal” and add the journals, blogs and websites that you would like to follow.

Multiple choice questions: the right choice?

Most high stakes entrance exams are conducted on the basis of results of multiple choice questions (MCQ). In a study published by the Economic and Political Weekly, Shobhit Mahajan and Pramod Shrivastava reveal that a candidate’s performance is governed chiefly by chance.

Real-life samples from an entrance examination, which had 57,000 applicants attempting two papers of 100 marks each were taken. Since the number of applicants was so large, there were instances when more than one person got the same score and rank. Says Mahajan: “We chose one of these question papers (which had 100 questions) and manufactured 10 other question papers created by randomly picking 50 questions from the 100 questions. As a result, we had 11 question papers for each student – the original paper and 10 fictitious ones. Since we had prepared the fictitious papers from the original paper, the scores of each student in each of the 10 fictitious papers were known. When we ranked them again, we took one rank, say 1,000. Now we took the 162 students who ranked 1,000 in the original exam. The rank 1,000 was chosen because in most exams, 1,000 or 1,500 is the usual cut-off rank. We took their marks in the 11 papers that we now had with us. And what we found was that the candidate who ranked 1,000 in the real exam was equally likely to have got a rank of say 650 or 1,400.”

What this study essentially says is that MCQs have a huge sampling error. It is an inherent limitation of this assessment tool. Agreed, that it is practical and feasible to use MCQs when the number of students is so low. But, the predictive validity of MCQs is pretty low. Does a student who scored cent percent in a MCQ test have any traits to be a competent doctor? Does this tool even test those qualities? A judicious mix of assessment tools needs to be used in selection examinations.

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