Cutthroat Pre-Meds

Always fierce, competition to get into U.S. medical schools this year has reached unparalleled heights--and depths. The number of would-be physicians has increased enormously over the past decade, but medical school expansion has not kept pace. Some 41,000 applicants are fighting for a scant 14,400 places. At many universities, pre-med students are engaged in a sort of academic guerrilla war to assure not only higher grades for themselves but also lower grades for their competing classmates. The result is an unhealthy atmosphere that could hurt the quality of American medicine.

In the grind for high grades, many pre-med students give up extracurricular activities and a normal social life in favor of almost unbroken stretches of studying. "People have become so obsessed with what grade they are getting that what they are learning becomes secondary," says James Young, 20, a Duke University junior. "I know a lot of people who started out pre-med and would have made excellent doctors, but who dropped out because of the competition and the grades." Those who stay on keep closemouthed about what they have learned. Shared studying among pre-meds is rare; a student who asks another for help may get an unhelpful "I don't know"--or worse, a deliberately misleading answer.

Dry-Lobbing. Says Carol Asada, 22, a pre-med junior at U.C.L.A. and president of Medicus, a pre-med student organization: "There's a lot of hostility and jealousy among students who are getting top scores." Complains another premed: "They're afraid if they tell you something you may get a better score than theirs." Few friendships survive such pressures. "One person might have a copy of last year's exams in a course and absolutely won't show it to anyone else," moans another Duke student.

In some cases, the competition turns into sabotage. Students take important books out of the school library and keep them so long that no one else can use them; a few have gone so far as to tear out crucial pages, making the books useless to other students. Pre-meds are also not above doctoring each other's laboratory work, adding extra ingredients to a classmate's chemistry experiments, or coughing in somebody else's culture dishes--thus starting unwanted bacteria colonies that ruin experiments. Caryn Lum, 20, a Stanford University senior who was recently accepted by two medical schools, tells of a friend who placed his samples from a qualitative analysis laboratory in an oven to incubate overnight; when he went to check them in the morning, they were gone--presumably stolen by a rival. Other students resort to "dry-labbing": faking the results of experiments on paper. Despite the possibility of stiff penalties for those who get caught, cheating in examinations has become widespread.

Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, for one, has taken steps to curb the competition by placing less importance on an applicant's test scores and searching for students with broad academic backgrounds and a record of participation in extracurricular activities. But many admissions officers still look mainly at grades and test scores, and automatically reject applicants if their marks are below a certain average, thus encouraging desperate competition.

"This atmosphere of opportunistic expediency does not augur well for the medical profession," says Frederick Hofmann, head of admissions at Columbia's medical school. He is right. Cutthroat medical students could well make cutthroat physicians.

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