The Medical Authorities of Of india (MCI) plans to conduct a national level entrance examination for entry to the MBBS course. The MCI reasons its action by stating that it wants to increase the standard of Medical Education in Of india.
There cannot be a second opinion that the standard of Medical education in Of india is far from Saeed mdcat satisfactory. There is an urgent need to re-evaluate the standards, content and technique of medical education in Of india.
Selecting the right students for training may be one prerequisite to achieve standards. But it remains a small step up achieving quality training. Unfortunately for every other professional education in Of india the selection process for entry was created to appear as the sole determinant of quality. The facilities of the institution, the caliber of teachers, the option of clinical material, the technique, research potential and uniformity of standards throughout the country does not attract attention and debate. This is unfortunate considering the big difference in the standards of education in several parts of our country and between institutions within the states.
Our medical education needs to be looked at with regard to its content and meaning. The MBBS course is called ‘medical education’ in Of india whereas it is called Medical Training all over the world. There is a sea of difference between the word ‘education’ and ‘training’. The Indian medical education involves studying amounts and amounts of books and getting theoretical knowledge with very less practical training. Like every other education in Of india, medical education does not help the student to develop practice driven thinking and clinical management methodologies. Students trained in the uk or US are better equipped to handle someone in a clinic or emergency room even if they may not have access to read so many books like their Indian counterparts.
The textbooks from England are meant for medical factors in the uk. The situations are presented like it were in a UK hospital. The American medical books present the American hospital environment and the American patients. Including the management of injury care is presented in American textbooks with the American ambulance service and emergency room scenario in the mind. That’s not the situation in our country. Western textbooks give more importance to metabolic diseases and congenital diseases which constitute a major disease burden in their countries. Our students see the British and American medical textbooks. This might be one reason why they all want to go to The uk and America!
They are not trained to go to an Indian commune and see someone in a Primary Health Center. They just do not read very much about malaria and skin infections which are so common in our country. They neither have books which give them inclusive knowledge about the Indian clinical scenario nor get the proper training for Indian clinical practice. We’d like more research on Indian epidemiology and teaching materials based on that.
We hear people talking about training our graduates to ‘international standards’. They insist which our professionals should be able to go to any country in the world and survive. The percentage of Indian medical graduates going abroad will be less than one percent. Should we be designing our medical programs to help these less than 1% to achieve their personal goals? No country in the world should plan its education programs to train their students to go abroad. We’d like doctors to serve our citizens. We would like large numbers of doctors to serve in countryside Of india. It is insane to talk about ‘international standards’ when what we need is a true ‘Indian standard’.
Another big handicap for the Indian student is which he has to learn medicine in a spanish. The best way to learn science or Medicine is to learn in one’s mother tongue. That will make the educational process interesting and help to develop research thinking. Every Eu, whether German, Spanish, French or European studies Medicine in their mother tongue. China, The japanese and even a small country like Thailand provide medical education in their mother tongue. It is a possibility. It is practical. The only opposition would be which our students cannot go abroad and work. That is a dull justification. First of all allow the medical graduates not go to abroad at all, leaving our country. If they want to go to another country speaking a different language for training they have to do exactly what the Chinese, the japanese and the Russians are doing. Graduates of these countries if they wish to go abroad they have to learn English, German or French or whatever language through the short course. Our students also have to do that. Our students may study English as second language in school. Organic beef even add English language teaching in the Medical programs as an option. So there cannot be any excuses for not teaching Medicine in their respective mother tongues in all the states.
When so much needs to be done to improve the standard of Medical learning Of india projecting common entrance examination for entering Medical education as the panacea for all this issues will be counterproductive.
Selecting candidates to the MBBS course is an important step up improving the standard of education. The selection process needs to be regularized. The private medical institutions and the so-called ‘deemed to be universities’ have a free run in the selection. A student who has failed in the matriculation examination and passed in the second attempt can also purchase a seat in these institutions. Most of the students entering some of these institutions have secured more than ten marks less than the lowest mark of a student entering the us government institution in earmarked category. There is no barrier of minimum marks for entering many of the private institutions. There is no competitive test for entry. The only requirements is money. The seats can be bought in open auction. This is of grave concern when you talk about maintaining the standard of medical education. We need to regularize the selection process, entry strategies and fee structure of the private institutions to achieve standards. The MCI appears to be not irritated about these issues for unknown reasons.
The Tamil Nadu experience has clearly shown the harms of the entrance examinations. Abolition of entrance examination has increased the percentage of countryside students entering professional courses from 28% to 64%. Reintroduction of entrance examination will reverse this and harm the countryside students. School education is a big business. Abolition of entrance examination helped not only the countryside students and also students from government high schools to enter professional colleges. If CET is introduced the private schools offering training for entrance examination along with the regular programs will make happy by improving their business. The training centers for entrance examination will flourish in cities and the rich and urban students will get excessive advantage. The countryside students will be marginalized.
The reason why the IITs, National Law Schools and Central Government Medical institutions remain the family room of the students from metropolitan cities is that the entrance examination to any or all these institutions derive from CBSE syllabus. Again looking at Tamil Nadu experience, one can see that out of the six and a district lakh students studying twelfth standard about five lakh are state syllabus students, about one and a half lakh are from matriculation syllabus. Only six thousand and odd students study CBSE syllabus. The CET will obviously be based on the CBSE syllabus which is more voluminous than other syllabuses. This will benefit a microscopic fraction and exclude large numbers of poor and the miserable from the countryside side.
Entrance examination is perceived as an evil in Tamil Nadu. Medical professional. Ramadoss who waged a tireless war against entrance examination for over a decade finally convinced hawaii government to abolish the entrance examination. It was a huge step up empowering the countryside students. Reintroduction of entrance examination will destroy these benefits to countryside students. The MCI should abandon its efforts for CET and work for improving the standard of medical training.