‘Upper-class’ drive plan for medical school test

PLANS to add aptitude tests to the selection procedure for medical schools will lead to more doctors’ children entering the profession, a medical professor warned.

Education Minister Noel Dempsey has given his support to proposals by the Working Group on Undergraduate Medical Education to make an aptitude test an additional requirement to Leaving Certificate results.

However, Ciarán Bolger, professor of clinical neuroscience at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, said the plans were being driven solely by the agenda of upper-class parents who want their children to qualify for medical schools.

“Before the points system was introduced more than 20 years ago, most medical students were children of doctors because of different selection procedures. It has only been since points came in that people from a wide spectrum are going to medical school,” said Prof Bolger.

He said it was impossible to define the aptitude required for medicine, just like many other professions, and described testing as a complete pseudo-science.

“Everybody knows everybody and as soon as you bring in something like what’s proposed, you benefit one group over another,” said the Beaumont Hospital consultant.

Prof Bolger, who has also lectured in the University of Bristol and in Adelaide, said his experience of the Australian model of aptitude testing for graduate entry to medical school has left people with top grades unfairly being told they were not suitable to become doctors.