Was wondering how long I’d have to scroll for this. The reality is that it’s unhealthy not to be “racist” when selecting health care providers right now due to historical policies like this.
When the right takes swipes at “DEI”, going after bar lowering in medical school is very high on the list of legitimate targets for them to attack. I don’t want to care about the race of my doctor, but do gooders gave me no choice by passing so many bad doctors.
This: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hsr2.161
Says The mean (±SD) USMLE step 1 score was significantly greater among non-[Black or Hispanic] applicants as compared to URiM applicants (223.7 ± 19.4 vs 216.1 ± 18.4, P < .01, two-sample t-test). This is at a specific medical school.
But more generally...imagine what would have to be true for us to go from BIG differences in g-loaded test performance to small / no differences. Either people fundamentally change somehow (get smarter / dumber), people's test scores systematically differ because they e.g. got better / worse at "tests" or something, independent of their underlying knowledge of the content or abilities, or it's attrition (e.g., very many minority med students wash out, leaving only those who should have been admitted in the first place).
None of those things seem plausible to me. The little glimpse we have from the two studies above is consistent with the obvious thing happening. Things are mostly the same, though I'd bet URM have higher wash-out rates, so differences get attenuated somewhat by the time they're practicing. Of course, URM vs non-URM will sort differently into specialties and geographies so there's that...you'll see bigger or smaller differences depending on how they sorted. A good question, as well, is why the USMLE people don't split reporting by race. I bet one of the reasons is they'd get a lot of flak because there would be big disparities. And good on them (maybe!) because one reason they might care about that is they want to produce good doctors, and watering down their test won't help with that.
When the right takes swipes at “DEI”, going after bar lowering in medical school is very high on the list of legitimate targets for them to attack. I don’t want to care about the race of my doctor, but do gooders gave me no choice by passing so many bad doctors.