The Power of Failure

One of the new NEXT exam proposals seem to be that final year practical exam marks will now have the potential to decide a candidate's entire future. At a time when USMLE is trying to reduce the stress on students by making step 1 pass/fail only (so that mugging up useless crap like which viruses are double stranded won't affect your future), the powers that be closer to home seem to be attempting to make things unnecessarily stressful. 

There is precious little merit in any practical exam. The only good thing about them is that it only matters if you pass or not. Some examiners will fail students based purely on personal issues. In some colleges, there are entire batches of students who passed after going to court to appeal their results. On the other side, many powerful parents also try to influence examiners just before such exams. As for me, I have good personal experience about how some examiners can go above and beyond their way in order to fail a student. 

For one of my practical exams, it was decided by certain parties beforehand that I should be "taught a lesson". During the exam, we were given blank papers to write instead of standard exam sheets. Clearly, if important people want to screw you, rules go out the window. We didn't find this unusual at the time of course because our minds were preoccupied with trying to recall the things we studied. 

There are exams where you know you did bad and are in trouble. This wasn't one of them. I answered most questions I was asked, even one on a rare syndrome. I wasn't perfect by any means but I was confident I did enough to pass fairly comfortably. So much so that even when rumours started to spread that some had failed this exam, I was still sure that I had nothing to worry. 

I did pass that year, but only by moderation (ie we have a leeway of 5 grace marks if we pass everything else). Me and 3 of my batchmates whose roll numbers were next to mine were failed in that exam. This appeared odd to anyone who knew our batch well because these weren't the people one would expect to be the only ones to fail (obviously it would be difficult to convince an outsider of this fact). All 4 of us passed all other exams, theory and practical. 

Only 1 of us 4 did not pass that year. That person was given so few marks that there was no chance of moderation. That person was supposed to be me. But the examiners were so unbelievably incompetent that they failed the wrong person. You see, the marklists filled by examiners don't have the names of candidates, only our 9 digit roll numbers. They mixed up the numbers and failed the person next to me.

I had no problem with failing exams. They are useful for stimulating us to learn things quickly but are an imperfect assessment of a person's overall quality. Once you get over the stigma of it, failing isn't a big deal. I had the right mindset to handle failure, but most aren't like that. That's why I continue to wish that they hadn't screwed up and failed me instead. The person next to me was a very bright candidate (more so than me)  whose life was sent into chaos for the next 6 months purely because of having a roll number next to mine. I would much prefer being set back a few months than have the guilt of inadvertently hurting my friend so much. 

The tamasha with the guilty parties didn't end there though. After the results came out, they were embarrassed and went into damage control mode. Junior batches were told one story about how we definitely deserved to fail while our batch was told a different one. We were told that a professor who wasn't even at the exam was actually the mastermind behind it all. The reasons given made no sense whatsoever but naive as we were, we accepted it without much question. This eventually resulted in me one day confronting this professor in a bid to understand what exactly his problem was to go to such lengths to screw me over.

It was only after a couple of years that I understood that this professor was likely just a scapegoat. I should have known that the people whispering stories in my ear and pointing fingers at others were actually trying to wash the dirt off their own hands. It still amazes me that people who are clearly way more important than I will ever be are compelled to go to such lengths to feel good about themselves. I will probably never find out the full story about what actually happened behind the scenes because it's not the nature of these jokers to admit guilt. 

Thankfully, all 4 of us have moved on since then. But imagine a scenario where such a nonsense exam would determine the fate of your entire career. These types of examiners may only be a minority but it is logistically impossible to stop such crappy behavior. Such an exam would not only do precious little to actually improve the quality of doctors passing out but will also increase the number of students with serious mental health issues. Many more will get disillusioned with medicine as a whole. Just because we were privileged enough to pass out before these poorly thought out ideas are implemented doesn't mean we should ignore the fates of our juniors. 

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