Take your medicine

Anyone else see the egghead student whining in the Indo today about not getting into online pharmacy viagra?

Some privileged 17 year old from Tipp got a load of A1s in her leaving certificate but failed the aptitude test for medicine which they introduced this year.

Now she's in the national press moaning her hole off about how terribly unfair it all is, since last year her top grades would have secured her a place in any of Ireland's medical schools.

Talk about missing the point.

We've had years of only the very bookish students being permitted to study medicine and, do you know what? It didn't improve our health service in the slightest.

In fact, the doctors themselves have been complaining that the system was promoting eggheads into medicine rather than people who actually had a vocation to be doctors. The Irish Medical Organisation has been pleading for changes to the system for years.

So now we finally have a system that says you still need something massive like 520 points in the leaving cert, but also demands that you pass a test designed to see if you're suited to being a doctor. Good news for all.

Except for whining Marie Claire McGrath. She blew the aptitude test after aceing her leaving cert. In short, she's been found out in a standardised test not to be a suitable candidate for medicine. The test itself examines specifically "a candidate's logical reasoning, problem solving and social skills." We'll come back to that in a minute.

Marie Claire clearly feels entitled to study medicine. So entitled that she's moaning in the media. You can't blame her for feeling entitled. Unkie is a well-off doctor and she'd like to be too. She tactically dropped subjects and changed schools (to one in Cork!) in order to max her chances of passing these exams.

She's also the kind of person who gives up easily. Having blamed the HPAT test for her own failing of it, she now 'doesn't know what she wants to do', but is not considering repeating the aptitude test for medicine.

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't want doctors who give up and whine at the first moment of failure. I want doctors who stay the course and get people well - who are prepared to fight, in other words.

I also don't want doctors who are so nakedly ambitious and self-entitled. Marie Claire's idea of problem solving isn't to retake the test or rethink her suitability for medicine. It's to complain in the national media. The test, she feels, is at fault rather than her. That's a major breakdown in logic: the test failed her; she didn't fail the test.

I don't know what her social skills are like, but if they're like her logical reasoning and her problem solving, it's not a bit of wonder that she flunked the aptitude test for medicine.

The whole point of the new medical entry system was to weed out the unsocial, self-entitled, egghead medics and replace them with warm caring human beings with a drive to help people. That's what the aptitude test is for, and it looks like it worked perfectly on this occasion.

Perhaps Marie Claire, a 17 year old girl who apparently 'dreams of working as a GP' since she was a kid, should take her medicine and go and do something else with her life.