Daily Times

Writing this article was hard as I was well aware of the censure and reprimand that I would have to take with a smile on my face. “You disapprove of the system because you could not become a doctor” will be one of the many. But I have just one question, and that question is from an MCAT paper itself:

Q: Who hypothesised Ominis cellula-e-cellula?

A: Rudolph Virchow; B: Schleiden; C: Lorenz Oken; D: Louis Pasteur

This is a matter of significance because such questions form a fraction of the 88multiple-choice questions (MCQs) that constitute the biology section of the Medical College Entrance Test (MCAT).

With two education systems running in parallel, one trains students to cram while the other promotes conceptual learning. The word ‘concept’ has been ridiculed in our society to such an extent that I always smirk while using it to substantiate my claim. The latter are always eyed as those who must have never bothered opening their books, who just enjoy three-plus-two years of their lives, and in the end, are awarded with grades just like that. But I beg to disagree that they have mistakenly confused ‘learning’ with ‘cramming’.

It is in the midst of this wide debate that our pre-university years pass, and the stage comes when we are inflicted upon with the verdict of our parents to take MCAT. Now let us dissect the problem down to its very root cause. Why is it such a big deal? What if someone does not become a doctor? This divide comes from the options our parents select for us from the various streams available; pre-medical and pre-engineering are preferred over commerce, computer science and social science. In this society, a person is triumphant and eminent if and only he is a doctor. Engineers come second, and all other professions (if you may allow me to call them so) are placed on third.

This mindset has led to the exploitation and declension of the youth, the medical fraternity and, eventually, the whole society. Many parents want their children’s name to be prefixed by the title ‘Dr’, and for that they can literally do anything. I have personally heard almost every intermediate student claiming to have joined schools just to get enrolled in the final examination, while tuition centres being the places where they actually used to hit the books. This is followed by yet another session of MCAT preparation, which together with the previous trend of schooling reveals an alarming situation. This readiness of parents to spend on their children in order to see them wearing a white lab coat is being brutally exploited by money-makers who have transformed the institution of education into a means of production of wealth. Has anyone ever questioned as to why pay the triple amount of fees for the same two-book syllabus per subject?

To counter any violation of accepted standards of conducting examination by the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education, the University of Health Sciences annually conducts MCAT for the induction of students into medical colleges of Punjab. It is assured and reassured by the authorities that students from A Level background should not and would not have to study the books of FSc in order to clear this test. They vindicate their stance by highlighting a sentence from a physics book from the Punjab Textbook Board, and a similar sentence from an A Level course book by one publisher. What they fail to realise is that parents of A Level students are not immoral people that they would buy books for their children from all authors and publishers. What if the very next sentence written in the FSc book is not mentioned in this one but another book by another publisher? Furthermore, how is a student supposed to tackle such MCQs that have been made simply by copying a sentence from the textbook, eliminating a word or two from it and transforming into an MCQ? Some students somehow manage to fulfil all the aforementioned requirements, but for majority this test comes more as a shock and a trauma rather than an examination.

What about those who could not succeed? Please do not worry. We have a long list of private medical colleges that will readily accept all sorts of students, even those who genuinely could not earn good grades, and surely do not deserve to be wasting a seat in a medical college. There is just one prerequisite. You must be wealthy enough to fill the pockets of the college administration. Approximately, one million rupees are charged per annum from each student by these medical colleges that are not even affiliated with a hospital or even an in-patient clinic.

So what’s next? These doctors graduate, find jobs in hospitals and take oaths to serve people selflessly. But what happens when they have to demand an increase in their basic pay or oppose the process of central induction? Instead of calling a hunger strike or refusing further promotions and raises, they shut down the outdoors and emergencies, block the roads, and protest. Their profession does not and cannot allow them to neglect even a single patient for their own vested interest. No issue excuses them of the crime they contemplate by becoming indifferent to the cries of their patients for whom they wear these lab coats and stethoscopes. These people have another purpose besides impressing people on stalls of chana chaat and rishta (match-making) aunties. A wine’s quality is directly determined by vintage grapes initially chosen, and similarly is dictated the calibre of doctors by the lot of students you take in to be trained as doctors.

I do not oppose MCAT or its purpose. I have reservations on its pattern and its use as a way of scrutinising the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education that conducts intermediate examinations. What guarantee could be given that this system is free and fair when cases of paper leaking have been lately reported, several times, also in this case? The authorities should neutralise the content of the test by judging students on concept-based questions, which will eventually help them in not selecting students who would later turn out to be protestors because of their one-track mind that dictates them to only worry about their self-interest. This is an advice not from a failure or a nakaam (unsuccessful) doctor, but from a citizen who has observed this system quite closely. And by a concept-based question I am referring to the following which has been taken from an A Level past paper:

Q: Glucose in urine can be detected using a biochemical test. When the end of a test strip, which is impregnated with the enzyme glucose exidase, is dipped into urine, the development of a blue colour indicates that glucose is present. This is a reliable test that people with diabetes can carry out at home. Which feature of the enzyme makes this test so reliable?

A: It is heat stable; B: It is specific; C: It lowers the activation energy of the reaction; D: It only works at low pH range.

The writer is a student of Biotechnology