Polite Dissent

As part of the third year of medical school, each student had to take a 3-month Surgery rotation. There were 3 choices for your Surgery rotation. You could choose Group A (the “I know I want to be a surgeon” group), Group B (the “I may want to be a surgeon” group) or Group C (the “no way in Hell am I going to be a surgeon” group). I was the poster child for Group C.

My 3-month rotation was made up of one month of Pediatric Surgery, one month of General Surgery at the VA hospital, and two weeks each of Vascular Surgery and ENT Surgery. The Pediatric Surgery was intense, but at least we were not expected to take call. The residents were fun to work with and the attending physicians instructive. The VA rotation was easily the most miserable month of my life. Unfriendly residents, unpleasant physicians and a grueling call schedule. I found Vascular Surgery interesting, and the surgeons were friendly and helpful. I was able to do my first stitching of a real patient during this rotation. The ENT rotation also went smoothly. I had bartended the ENT Christmas party the year before, so I knew all the residents and instructors (and how much they drank).

In addition to the surgeries and routine patient care, there were daily lectures, monthly multiple-choice exams, a 12-page paper, and a take-home 60-question test. We were supposed to study for exams, write the paper and answer the questions in the free time we had left over from our 16-hour days at the hospital. I would get home at 9 PM, study and write for an hour or two then climb into bed and fall asleep, only to wake up a few hours later to get back to the hospital for pre-pre-rounds at 4 AM.

The take-home test consisted of the same 60 questions that had been used every year for at least the last decade. If you knew the right people, you could get answers to the questions that had been handed down from student to student for the same length of time. Dr. K-, the chairman of the Surgery Department, graded each set of answers. Rumor had it that he just picked 10 random answers and awarded a score based on those answers alone. Almost everyone received a score of 7/10 or 8/10.

I didn’t know the right people, but one of the other students on my VA rotation did. Unfortunately she discovered that the answers were on three diskettes and she did not have a computer. Being the nice guy I am, I offered to print out the answers for her as long as I could copy the diskettes. She agreed and I was in business.

The first sign of trouble was when I realized that there were nearly 100 files on the diskettes. Whoever had written the answers had saved each page as a separate file. They had saved some as text files, some as RTF, and some as DOC files. Sometimes different formats for the same answer.

Then, as I printed out each page for the other student, I would skim the answers. My heart sunk as I found mistake after mistake. Not subtle mistakes, but obvious ones — like having the heart on the wrong side of the chest. I found that I had to read each answer closely, carefully ascertain which portions were right and which were wrong, and then correct each mistake I found. It was a tedious process, but after two weeks of hard work the test was finished.

As I turned in my answers, I realized that I had spent more time poring over answers and correcting mistakes than I would have if I had just answered the questions on my own. Truly crime does not pay.

On the bright side, I scored a 9/10, where everyone else using the same answers scored a 7/10.