This student is taking a complaint to court in a lawsuit against the AAMC.
Related posts:
- Should the MCAT grant extra time for students with learning disabilities?
- Odd cause of malpractice?
- Should you question your doctor?
- Non-medical news of the day
- How the courts are harming pain management
- Should tobacco companies pay for screening tests?
- The Sophie Currier saga continues
KevinMD.com on Facebook
{ 5 comments }
The headline implies that someone merely disagreed with a question on the test. This version of the MCAT had a verbal passage followed by questions from a completely unrelated passage. Students at some testing centers were told to ignore the passage while some were not told there was a mistake. Are you saying you wouldn’t have a problem if this happened to you?
there is scant evidence that students were informed at informed centers. is there ANY evidence that scores at centers that told students about the error did statistically different than other uninformed centers or from test takers on a whole?
frankly, if you are shaken up so badly as to throw you off an entire test by an unexpected mistake (this is one passage out of an 8 hour exam) then maybe a job that does not require life and death decisiveness under stressful and error prone situations is more to your suiting.
mike
well said mike. if they simply disqualify that question everyone is on equal ground. besides, if he says he spent his entire time on that one question, i seriously doubt he’s in the right field. anyone thinking on that day woudl simply read the question and decide it made no sense or they didn’t have the knowledge to know what they were asking and simply mark an arbitrary answer and move on. he wasn’t the only non-informed test taker that day. as it is standardized equal numbers of people would get it wrong and it would not even matter. Skipping a question is just as good as getting a wrong answer am I correct?
I don’t want people like this in my profession.
I expect people with enough judgement and presence of mind to manage their time on a test.
I expect people with enough equanimity to handle minor anoyances without making a legal case out of it.
Imagine how this guy will handle all the inequities and unfair experiences that constitute life as a clinician?
Questions with high rates of failure–statistically higher than would be expected–are usually flagged and sometimes excluded. If it was excluded for everyone, then there is no harm done. It is also true that some questions are placed on tests as experiments, to determine the correct answer rate and possibly for future use but not for the purpose of scoring.
Comments on this entry are closed.