Exams

The exams this year have been impossible. I really don't know where they pick the questions from. Oh, wait. Perhaps they're all from UMAP.

Last year I travelled to Manchester to join in on a GMC consultation (my Profs told me that the GMC had never consulted on anything before) on the future of medical education. One of the questions was whether or not there should be a national exam, similar to the US system. Nearly everybody in that room said that there should be no national exam. They stated many reasons, but the one that stuck in my mind was that the delivery of the medical curricula should be unique to each medical school. If not, then surely we should just pool everyone's resources and stick an enormous medical school in the middle of the country. It'd make sense. Academic staff are always in short and using the vast array of experience that the staff in this country have would create some amazing doctors.

But that would be boring. The medical school I go to, without being specific, teaches us a lot of things about Patient Centred Care, social aspects of medicine and how we should always consider the patient's viewpoint. I dare say that in certain medical schools in a fairly large city in the south east don't learn about these things at all. That's where our schools differ. It makes things interesting, and I believe will eventually but is in great competition with each other over which doctor is best. I believe that the unique things that each medical school brings are important, and should be preserved.

So this brings me back to UMAP. Surely a bank of questions shared between medical schools is one step closer to a national exam? I know that the exams won't be the same in each school, but the essence that I can be tested on a question writted by the Professor of Herbology at St. Andrews (we don't do any herbology by the way, and I doubt they do either) alarms me a little. I think that that is perhaps what we have seen in our exams this year. The 'theme A' exams on Monday and Tuesday were the hardest things i've ever seen, and I hadn't heard of half the things mentioned the questions!

Writing original and challenging questions that fit within the curricula is hard. But should we really support the GMC's ideal of an Űber national exam by participating in UMAP?

I think not.