[Siddarth1977]

My school had weed out classes in my program, but it had nothing to do with graduate admissions or competitive rankings.

The point was that it's better to have a student struggle and make adjustments earlier rather than later in their education. Regardless if that adjustment is "spend more time studying" or "change from STEM to something easier", it's better for it to happen in a students first year than fourth year in college.

The system seemed to work well to me. Lots of smart kids who didn't have to work very hard in high school learned early that they were going to have to work harder in college. Other kids realized they were better changing majors. Everyone who was still in the program their junior year had the confidence that they could graduate.

[hilbert42]

"Lots of smart kids who didn't have to work very hard in high school learned early that they were going to have to work harder in college."

Some don't learn early either. I was smart enough to coast along for quite a while doing little and then I suddenly had to apply myself (it was a bit of a shock). I had to relearn how to apply myself and it was harder than I anticipated.

Of course, this never applied to truly brilliant kids (they're the ones I envy). It also doesn't help when one's parents kept pointing to a couple of brothers who lived several blocks away from my home and saying to the effect 'why can't you stop mucking around and just apply yourself like them'. (They were in different classes to me and a year's difference separated them. Trouble was my mother and theirs used to associate with each other (mother's club and all that stuff), so such comparisons were easy.)

It turned out later that it wasn't that they just had normal brains but with lost of application to study—but more. Some years later (perhaps a decade or so) I opened the pages of Scientific American and started reading a fascinating and informative article, it was then that I turned to the author's name only to realize that I knew that 'bastard'. Also a check of the references showed that he had a string of publications about the subject in other advanced publications.

As they say, that's life.

[cannaceo]

My experience in medical school is that your success is based on your ability to memorize large amounts of information that is of low conceptual difficulty in short periods of time. This isn't a trait that is selected for in passing ochem. Furthermore, ochem is the last time in your undergrad or medical school training where you'll be faced with that level of conceptual rigor.

You could just as easily ask all the undergrads to train for a marathon and see who has the discipline to follow through. It would probably be more relevant because at least its health-related.

I think overall we want our doctors to have high general intelligence so we'll continue to demand o-chem. We all have our biases against the kids who couldn't pass o-chem.

[hilbert42]

"We all have our biases against the kids who couldn't pass o-chem."

Do you think that really true? I know some people who struggled with it who took it (or had to take it) as a major. Others, found it easy because they were good at remembering many details, yet others loved its systematic order.

I love the subject but the amount of detail drives me batty at times (one only has to thumb through a copy of Merck to be overwhelmed by the number of processes, etc.)—and I don't have a photographic memory.

However, I don't see that as a major issue in the long run, for if one is heavily involved with some of its specialized threads/areas then it all makes sense at that level (well sort of for much—duh, some—of the time).

Unlike physics where the rules seem clearer and more straightforward, the detail in o-chem throws people (especially those who don't have a good memory for detail). From my experience, this can become an acute problem around exam time when other subjects are competing for attention. Some people do much better in that situation than others, it doesn't mean that they're not good students, or haven't tried hard enough—or that they even dislike the subject.

It seems to me it's the nature of the beast that is actually the real culprit. Perhaps that ought to be taken into account when teaching the subject (for instance, we could offset o-chem exams from others by scheduling them to be held at a different time of year).

Just a thought.