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Dr Shock MD PhD
The government of The Netherlands has decided to abolish the numerous fixus (weighted lottery) for medical education. This meant that only 2850 students were able to go to med school a year. The numerous fixus was mainly based on high grades on high school. Universities are allowed to make there own selection criteria for admittance to med school. They could still use the average high school grades but they can’t increase the number of medical students since medical education is very expensive. In The Netherlands a med student costs a 120.000 Euros a year, for comparison a students at Law school costs about 30.000 Euros a year.
But how do you select medical students. Which criteria should you use. Universities in The Netherlands have been experimenting with selection of medical students. One of them recently published the results of a controlled experiment. This experiment is unique since due to the transition phase in selecting students for medical education in The Netherlands they were able to compare different selected groups of medical students.
They compared 389 medical students that were admitted to medical education by selection with 938 students who had been admitted by weighted lottery between 2001 and 2004. The weighted lottery means that students …