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EVERYTHING about HPAT and getting medicine
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Would fully agree with you on all of that.tallaght01 wrote: »I think the most important skill a young potential doctor can show is a good work ethic, and ability to achieve a difficult goal that they've set for themselves.
Medical school will be like the leaving cert. The course material isn't complex enough that someone with a very good leaving cert couldn't cope. BUt there is shed loads of information to learn over a long period of time. Your recall needs to be good (sleep deprived at 4am you need to be able to recall all the causes of a low pulse rate there and then).
Btw, as Tallaght knows, but just for the benefit of others who may be following the discussion, I'm not a doctor, nor did I ever study (nor have any interest in studying) medicine.
My interest in all this (and what limited understanding I have of it) comes I suppose from two sources:
(a) as an educator myself
(b) as someone who shared a house with 5 med students all through college. Add to that the fact that most people were in apartments or whatever, that our place was big (albeit old and cold and draughty) and it therefore became the social / community centre for their whole year, and indeed at times those from classes above and below them. I therefore got to know a lot of med students and even some of the teaching staff very well, and some of them are still close friends.
Equally, I should note that Tallaght IS a doctor, and a consultant in fact.
That seems to be HPAT's thinking as well ... given that those with 550-600 LC points are adjusted and capped at 560 (btw, I actually think that's too much of an adjustment, so I would be kind of agreeing with you there).tallaght01 wrote: »I think once you're getting over 550 points there's not much difference between the candidates. So, if someone with 550 way outscored someone with 600 points on the HPAT then I'd probably be OK with that.
Now, you see, that's the bit that worries me.tallaght01 wrote: »HPAT success shows that you're good at the HPAT. It's not some holy grail. It's never been shown to have any correlation with med school success.
As I keep saying on this thread, I don't know enough about HPAT to have an informed opinion as to whether it's a helpful addition to the recruitment system or not.
Given that it's been imported from Oz, and that you've been working there for a few years now, and presumably have some sense of their longer experience with it there, I can't say it fills me with confidence to hear you say that.
The things it's supposed to measure ...(i) Logical Reasoning and Problem Solving
(ii) Interpersonal Understanding
(iii) Non-Verbal Reasoning
... I think are useful to measure and take note of, if it in fact measures them. If it doesn't, then it's just an extra layer and extra stress on the candidates.
Personally, the kinds of things I would like to see included in the equation are:
Logical and deductive reasoning / problem solving / analytical skills
It could be argued that these are assessed by the LC, and maybe to some extent they are, but I wouldn't feel that it assesses them all that well, and I'd be inclined to argue that it does so rather less than it used to (and that's from someone who has corrected LC Hons).
I don't think that's deliberate policy on the part of DES or the SEC, btw. The way people tackle the LC seems to have changed over the years, probably under the influence of grind school culture permeating into the broader populace. It was always heavily dependent on memory, but now memorisation seems to have taken over as the primary and almost the only approach to LC, esp. in areas like English, History, Geography, Irish, etc.
I couldn't count the number of comments I've seen in this forum about how someone "has an essay memorised on X" and is hoping that it will come up, or bemoaning the fact that it didn't, or saying that they had to "make it fit the question". And it reflects what I've seen recently in RL as well.
That isn't how I tackled my LC certainly, or any of my immediate peer-group, and we all did damn well. How many essays did you learn off, Tallaght?
I didn't have one essay memorised, or even one paragraph tbh. We studied the course material, certainly, and made sure we knew it, and we learned off things like quotes for English, and formulae for maths, and so on, but we relied far more on our ability to use what we knew to formulate appropriate answers to the questions on the day, rather that going in with ready-made essays, and panicing if we couldn't fit them in.
I presume some people still do it that way, and that they do well ... but the rote learning route seems to be taking over.
And while I fully agree with Tallaght that a good memory is essential to a doctor ... far more so than most professions, in fact, as an engineer (for example) will normally have plenty of time to pull down a book or check something on the internet if it has slipped his mind, a luxury not normally accorded to a doctor faced with a patient who has gone into arrest.
But being able to use the information committed to memory, and make a good call based on that information, is also essential.
Or have I been watching too much House?! :pac:
People skills / empathy
I presume this is what HPAT mean by interpersonal understanding?
I'm also wary of using the word "empathy", because I suspect that Tallaght will jump in and tell me that doctors who have too high a level of empathy, and become too personally invested in their patients, are likely to become very emotionally stressed and burn out quickly ... and I wouldn't disagree.
Some is necessary though.
And no, I am NOT suggesting that all "clever people have no social skills", not by a long shot. I'll address that point later.
Btw, I would also note that this is not as easy a thing to assess as some people might think.
Reasons for choosing to do medicine
It's not so much that I think there is a "right" reason to do medicine, as that I believe that there are at least two wrong reasons for doing it, at least if either of these is the sole or predominant reason.
One is the status / income reason. Nothing wrong with a potential doctor liking the fact that (eventually) their chosen profession, if s/he works hard and is good enough, is likely to bring her / him a good income, respect and status.
The odd time though (I don't actually think it's all that common) you will meet a person who seems to have that as the predominant reason for their choice. That worries me, both for future patients but also for the individual him / herself. Medicine is hard graft, and heavy on the miracle at an emotional level, and I think you need a lot more than that to carry you through, at least if you are to survive as a caring and a fully whole individual.
The second reason that would worry me (again if it's the sole or primary reason) is the family tradition reason.
I'm thinking of the children of doctors who grow up under pressure from parents to follow in their footsteps, or who themselves feel, even sometimes sub-consciously, that they are obligated to follow that path.
Again, we're talking a small number of people, and I would add two caveats:
(a) the children of doctors are probably in a better position than most to understand what is involved, and to make an informed decision, provided they don't allow themselves to be blinkered or blinker themselves. Many children of doctors do follow in their parents' footsteps; for most, it's a good decision. Not for all.
(b) While some doctors dream of their children following in their footsteps, there are probably as many who would actively discourage their kids, as well as many others who support their children to make their own choices without pushing either a pro- or anti- agenda.
Those are the kind of things I would like to see taken into account in terms of recruitment for medicine, and given more emphasis than they have been given in the past.
Is that an easy "ask"? No, not really. For one thing, it's a lot easier and more transparent to rely on something like LC points. For another, any attempt to assess those factors well would probably be costly in resources (human as well as financial). Some at least of those factors are not that easy to test validly, reliably, objectively and transparently. Personally, I've seen some much-lauded "testing instruments" which I wouldn't trust to reliably assess which side I dressed on!
Does the HPAT reliably assess any or all of the above? Well, it certainly doesn't assess the third factor I mentioned ... the reason(s) people are choosing to take up medicine. The others? I honestly have no idea.
True. But I will trust a capable doctor who obviously knows what they're doing, even if their interpersonal skills are poor. Doesn't mean that I wouldn't prefer not to get a long-suffering sigh or a glare when I ask them to explain to me what exactly is wrong / what exactly the treatment will do. And yes, it has happened to me personally ... not often, but it has.tallaght01 wrote: »I don't think it will give us a generation of docs with better interpersonal skills. That side of things is generally a myth. Doctors consistently come out on the top of polls asking which professions people trust most.
Plus I think we are trained to trust doctors as children by our parents ... naturally enough, if you think about it ... and that stays with us into adult life very often, unless something happens to disrupt it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, btw.tallaght01 wrote: »A medical school class of high achievers has roughly the same proportion of dickheads as I met in the general population before going to uni.
I'd agree with that.
Woah back, now!tallaght01 wrote: »Talk of clever people having no social skills is a myth ...
I never made any such sweeping statement!
Nor do I agree with it, either for clever people who become doctors or clever people who don't!
Certainly, just to go back to the medical students who I mentioned earlier in this post and who I knew well, it certainly wasn't true for the vast majority of them. For the most part, they were a very sociable bunch, who worked hard and, when they had the opportunity, played twice as hard.
But I also knew a few, a small minority, whose social and inter-personal skills were very poor. Give them a textbook, put them in a lab, they were grand. But ... ! It's probably true for the sciences generally, tbh, but I think it's more of a handicap for a doctor who must deal with patients. Unless and until they end up in pure research, they are fighting an uphill battle. Certainly, a couple of those I knew who fit that profile didn't make it that far, having washed out either as advanced students or as HO's.
Thanks!!tallaght01 wrote: »... largely perpetuated by people who aren't clever to make themselves feel better.
I agree with you there, actually ... plus add in the usual reaction from peers to those whom they perceive as "swots".tallaght01 wrote: »It's also a result of some of these kids having locked themselves away for their teenage years studying.
I think we've looked at most of those points further up, n'est pas?tallaght01 wrote: »But medicine is about working hard consistently, and remembering a LOT of stuff. The best consultants tend to be the cleverest ones. Medicine has always attracted some seriously bright people, and this is for the good of the patients. I have no real problem with HPAT. But I do think there needs to be a rejig of it's weighted value when kids who work solidly for several years (at an age where it's easy to get sidetracked) and get results in the top 0.1% in the country can't get a place on a medicine course, but could easily go and do other health related courses with their results.
Oh jeebus, what a long post!!
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randylonghorn wrote:Oh jeebus, what a long post!!
Defendant: tallaght01
Judge: randylonghorn
Sentence: Death by wall of text. 0 -
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I have taken a note of approx 30 scores and percentiles. Is anybody out there interested in them if i submit them, or am i on my own here ?
I dont want to bore everybody to death about this .....
Haha, ive been doing that aswel for the last hour cos im so bored at work! You can put them up if you want and if i've any more ill add them!
EDIT: Meh, still bored, so here goes....this is what i've got from peoples posts on boards
Percentiles: Scores:
99 ~202
98 198
96 191/192/193
94 187/188
93 185/186
92 183/184
91 182
89 179
88 178
87 177
86 176
84 173
82 171
81 170
76 166
73 164
72 163
71 162
69/70 161
60 160
55 153
49 150
44 147
38 144
34 141
23 1330 -
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Anne-Marie!! wrote: »Haha, ive been doing that aswel for the last hour cos im so bored at work! You can put them up if you want and if i've any more ill add them!
EDIT: Meh, still bored, so here goes....this is what i've got from peoples posts on boards
Percentiles: Scores:
99 ~202
98 198
96 191/192/193
94 187/188
93 185/186
92 183/184
91 182
89 179
88 178
87 177
86 176
84 173
82 171
81 170
73 164
72 163
71 162
69/70 161
55 153
49 150
44 147
38 144
34 141
23 133
The following may be added (from recent posts):
100 230
76 166
............and 60 160 which looks odd to me!
..............Ade R.........
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Anne-Marie!! wrote: »Hmm, that is a bit odd, ya
Not sure about the 100...i dont think a 100th percentile exists? 99th percentile would cover pretty much everyone >200
......Mea Culpa on the top percentile!
......Well done and keep up the good work.
.........A de R......0 -
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Shaddap you!! :pac:KnifeWRENCH wrote: »Defendant: tallaght01
Judge: randylonghorn
Sentence: Death by wall of text.
And I'm certainly not the judge in this case! If you must dump us into an adversarial set-up (and I don't see it that way) then advocates arguing a case would be nearer the mark ...
Far from the first time Boards has fulfilled that function, and I'm sure it won't be the last ...Well because of boards.ie the information is in the public domain!!!0 -
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