Assessment

I’m sure you notice the flaw of my discussion yesterday.

Exactly – there’s no reliable assessment of the two domains that of our applicants.

To be slightly more specific, the correlation between the intellectual capability of the applicants and their performance in open examination (be it DSE, IB, or any other) is modest, and there is no way to test their enthusiasm or humanistic quality. The result is inevitable: Medical schools will have to neglect the heart and focus on the brain of an applicant, and, as pointed out by Daniel Kahneman’s rule of WYSIATI (what you see is all there is), only the result of public examinations could be considered.

You may ask: How about the admission interview?

Unfortunately, the interview serves, by and large, a symbolic function rather than having any pragmatic value. To say the least, the two medical schools are essentially using the interview as a tool of screening out – in order to eliminate applicants with outstanding performance in the examination but overt untreated psychiatric diseases (vacancies are reserved in the headquarters).