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Comment by bigd | Hacker News Reader

In both cases cheating is a sympthom of a larger issue: in case 1, requiring your doctor has an A grade to in organic chemistry is BS.

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I don't think that expecting a doctor to do well in o-chem is a bad idea. Why? Organic chemistry is considered by many people to be extremely difficult because it forces those who are really skilled at it to have strong intuitive skills and to practice those skills. And that's definitely something that I want my doctor to be good at: diagnostic and intuition.

The hard work part of orgo is memorization.

The easy part of organic chemistry is taking the first course where you memorize a lot of stuff, but if you move forward to useful things then there's no way to memorize it all which is why you have to actually be intelligent, rather than simply being able to memorize and regurgitate.

My understanding was that Orgo I is often considered the "weeder course" for people on a path for med school. At my university, the last 3rd of the first course was pretty much all memorization that facilitated Orgo II (I know this because I wasn't planning on taking II and decided not to do a great job on the memorization but still did good enough in the class).

That's what I'm saying - memorization is useful enough for basic concepts but it won't help you pass the MCAT.

I'm not saying is a bad idea. I think a doctor has to be smart. But that said, I'm not convinced that my doctor need to know all the nuances of Diels-Alder, and pass OrgChem with top grades.

But, thinking further, I do not really understand how the evaluation is done.

What does that A grade really means? It means he has a grasp of what benzene is, or that I can hire him for doing my syntheses?

The system is very broken. I hope one day we'll have some serious D&D-like rules in our instruction:

   MD: 
       Org Chem >8
       Surgery >14
       Int >16
       Char >14

   OrgChemist: 
       Org Chem >18
       Surgery >4
       Int >15
       Char > 3

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