Medical school place lottery mooted
AUCKLAND: A former medical school dean is proposing a lottery system to ease huge pressure on students who now have to get ‘‘geniuslevel marks’’ to get into medicine.
Prof Peter Crampton, who led the University of Otago’s medical school from 2011 to 2018, says ‘‘incredibly stressful competition’’ for limited places is ‘‘not helpful for anybody’’.
He wants New Zealand to consider a system like one used until 2018 in the Netherlands, which ran a national lottery for medical school selection that was weighted by students’ highschool grades but chose students by ballot rather than in grade order.
‘‘I think there are better and more humane ways to work with our young people who have aspirations to be health professionals,’’ he said.
Selection pressure at New Zealand’s two medical schools at Otago and Auckland Universities has intensified partly because of preferences for underrepresented ethnic and other groups, who this year became a majority of domestic students admitted to secondyear medicine at Otago and almost half at Auckland.
That has reduced the places for the remaining ‘‘general’’ category in Auckland from 175 in 2015 to 130 this year, while general applications have remained at between 450 and 600 each year.
The result has been an increase in the lowest average grade required for general students to get into secondyear medicine from 7.25 in 2015 to 8.25 this year, on a scale that runs from zero for marks under 50% to 9 for marks of 90% or above.
At Otago, the median marks of firstyear students admitted to second year under the general category rose from 83% last year to 95% this year.
Prof Crampton said such high grade averages ‘‘don’t reflect the qualities that you want in an individual — that’s just one predictor’’.
‘‘Some of the complaints and beliefs about the necessity for geniuslevel marks in order to study medicine are an artefact of competition. They don’t reflect the underlying reality,’’ he said.
Auckland doctor Justin Tung, whose tutoring company works with about a third of students selected for secondyear medicine at Auckland, said the grade required to get in was so ‘‘absurdly high’’ he had become ‘‘like a fulltime counsellor’’.
‘‘I have taken students into hospital because of mental health breakdowns during the year,’’ he said.
He supported Prof Crampton’s call to reduce the emphasis on academic grades.
‘‘There should be just a threshold for grades and then they should be ranked on their interview and other assessments such as the UCAT [University Clinical Aptitude Test].
‘‘I think that would take a lot of pressure off,’’ he said.
Otago University drew a storm of protest recently when it signalled a review of its ‘‘Mirror on Society’’ selection policy, which aims to ‘‘ensure that the makeup of its health professional classes is equivalent to holding a mirror up to society’’.
This year it gave 145 of its 283 domestic places in secondyear medicine to groups underrepresented in the medical profession: Maori (66), Pacific (25), rural areas (41), decile 13 schools (11) and refugee families (2).
Auckland allocated 124 out of 257 domestic places to similar groups: Maori and Pacific (65), rural and regional (51), decile 13 schools (5), students with disabilities (2) and refugee families (1).
The lowest grade point averages for firstyear students accepted into Auckland’s second year were 5 for the Maori and Pacific category and 6.25 for rural and regional, compared with 8.25 for the general category.
Those were all high marks — a grade point average (GPA) of 5 represents marks averaging at least 70%, a GPA of 6 at least 75% and 8 at least 85%.
A 2017 study led by Assoc Prof Elana Curtis found that, despite their lower starting points, 80% of Auckland’s students admitted through the Maori and Pacific admission scheme between 2002 and 2009 graduated, compared with 91% from the rural scheme and 94% of the general category.
In the Netherlands, medical schools now determine their own entry criteria. — The New Zealand Herald