Doctors 'Cheating' On Board Certifications 238
Maximum Prophet writes "After taking board exams, doctors have been routinely getting together to remember and reproduce as much of the exam as they can. These notes are then bound and reproduced. According to the American Board of Dermatology, the exams are protected by copyright laws, and any reproduction not approved by the board is illegal. While I have no doubt that the Board believes this, and pays lawyers to believe it as well, I don't think they understand copyright. Perhaps they should invest in better testing methods."
IT Certificate (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:IT Certificate (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, there's this thing called Residency, which is a big difference compared to IT work...
Re:From An Insider (Score:2, Insightful)
Speaking as an MD, and posting anonymously through more proxy jumps than you can count, I can tell you that the ABR is a disgrace.
They have elected to ELIMINATE the oral exams.
Did they give a justification for this? I can think of two reasons.
The first is cost, which you seem to blame, where the written exams are cheaper to administrate.
The second is CYA (Cover Your Ass), that for something like licensing, if someone complains about your decision (you fail someone, or you pass someone who later gets involved in a malpractice suit), it's a lot easier to defer blame to a written test. (of course they probably wouldn't admit this reason)
Re:IT Certificate (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, there's this thing called Residency, which is a big difference compared to IT work...
Yeah, you get treated like children and work 80 hours a week and get little pay when doing residency.
IT interns get treated like slaves and workd 100 hours a week and often get no pay.
this is a sign that the overall school / testing n (Score:5, Insightful)
this is a sign that the overall school / testing needs change and new ways to learn / test people. We need more apprenticeships / trades learning system and less end less classroom with test that people who can cram can pass and get rid of tests that have little to do with the real job.
Why not an NDA? (Score:4, Insightful)
Copyright is a dumb way to protect a test.
A much simpler and easier way would simply be for the AMA to have test takers agree to a very simple NDA. You agree not to share specific questions from this test with anyone. Covers the actual problem, is enforceable, doesn't require twisting copyright law in crazy ways. What's the downside?
Summary fails copyright law (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rote learning is the tragedy we will always fac (Score:4, Insightful)
in most subjects i would agree with you, but i don't think i would want an imaginative doctor (at least not at the expense of a strong level of basic competence). some things damned well should be done by rote, based on centuries of hard-won experience.
some people do have to come up with the new stuff, but most doctors don't and shouldn't be trying.
Re:Rote learning is the tragedy we will always fac (Score:4, Insightful)
The American method of 'learning' is mostly rote learning
Overall? No. I'd say the US has been much better in this respect than many other countries. (Though "No Child Left Behind" has done its damndest to screw that up by encouraging teachers to teach-to-the-test.) However, it is like this for premeds, and that's what matters!
Why? The stakes are too high. Push up the stakes high enough, and people don't think; they memorize. Indeed, when faced with very high incentives in psychological studies, people bomb IQ tests. You can't think when something as important as a career as a doctor is on the line. (That's why classes need to be exactly as hard as necessary -- and no easier -- but also no harder!!)
It's also how biology is taught in college. "Go memorize this arbitrary chemical pathway. No, we won't talk about 'why.' Yes, you can forget it later. We all know this class is just for weeding, anyway." Partly because it's all premeds. (And partly because there's no helping the fact that, compared to physics, biology is much more about facts than principles. It's messier. Such is life.)
Re:MD degree is to long and the school mindset may (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit is entirely subjective. I know engineers who are focused on engineering to the extent that they know (and care) nothing about anything else. So maybe you have a point. People like that do the bare minimum work necessary to pass their out-of-major courses and retain nothing. Maybe it's not worth teaching some people anything but what they will most predictably use in their career.
But a doctor is more than a technician. He or she is in the business of caring for people. A one-dimensional engineer might be competent and get the job done, but he might lack in creativity -- I know plenty like that. A one-dimensional doctor doesn't understand his patients. He doesn't understand that two patients with the same disease may express themselves in very different ways or that two patients that *say* the same thing about their condition may be describing different systems. He may not understand the psychological aspects of living with disease. Etc.
The more a doctor knows about PEOPLE, the better it enables him to practice MEDICINE.
To some extent, the same is true of engineers and programmers. You might know how to perform a certain task, but where do you learn to understand what customers want? They sure to hell don't teach that in your engineering classes and it damn sure is important to know.
I don't think submitter understands copyright (Score:4, Insightful)
Paraphrasing is paraphrasing. Copying is copying. And tests are valuable only when they test what they are designed to test, and not rote memorization(*)
(*) Apologies to any pharmacology majors who have to memorize more than most people memorize in their life.
Re:MD degree is to long and the school mindset may (Score:4, Insightful)
One of my high school friends is a doctor. He finally finished his last year of school/residency/fellowship/whatever and got a Full Time Job around when we were both 32.
His job is to look at slides of liver cells and decide if they are cancerous. That's it. Now, I understand that could be a very tough decision, and a huge one in many people's lives, and I'm sure making that decision earns him a doctor's salary.
But... did he really need 15 years of education to make that decision? I know his last two years of education were in a fellowship just for liver cancer, and I assume some previous amount of his training covered cancer and livers, but all the rest is sort of wasted. Isn't there an option for those that want to specialize to learn less and be licensed for less?
I'm an electrical engineer. I know that I could never design a safe bridge (unless there's a good application note I could read). If engineering was like medicine, I would have been expected to go to school for 15 years to become an "engineer" capable of doing civil/electrical/mechanical/software/materials science/etc. and I would need to be paid drastically more to cover the staggering loan payments. But instead engineers figured out how to specialize and keep costs low.
Why can't doctors?
Re:IT Certificate (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cry me a river. (Score:4, Insightful)
The entire point is that they are not. The US "health" system is really an insurance system. Now do you see why the rest of the world is laughing at those idiots in the USA that got sucked in by the PR campaign from the insurance companies about doing a tiny bit to shift it back to healthcare again. Leave the doctors alone and complain to those in politics that over the years colluded with insurance companies to take health care away from them. Vote out your local idiot that was bribed to help keep the insurance profits high.
Re:IT Certificate (Score:5, Insightful)
OECD data show that in 2008, the US paid 16 percent of GDP in total health care costs, public and private combined. This resulted in a life expectancy of 78.3 years, and the US is ranked 12th on the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index.
Same data for Norway show that in 2008, we paid 8.5 percent of GDP in total health care costs. We spent half as much! But our lives are 2.5% longer (80.2 years life expectancy), and we are ranked 1st on the IHDI.