{"id":207,"date":"2010-03-01T16:36:56","date_gmt":"2010-03-01T21:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2010\/03\/01\/physics-for-pre-meds\/"},"modified":"2010-03-01T16:36:56","modified_gmt":"2010-03-01T21:36:56","slug":"physics-for-pre-meds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2010\/03\/01\/physics-for-pre-meds\/","title":{"rendered":"Physics for pre-meds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last June,\u00a0 a committee convened by the Association of American Medical Colleges<\/a> and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute<\/a> issued a report titled Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians<\/a>, proposing changes to the science requirements for medical students, including both the pre-med and medical-school curricula.\u00a0 Among other things, this report is intended as input to a committee that is planning major revisions to the MCAT<\/a> some time around 2014.\u00a0 As far as I can tell, physics faculty members (including me until recently) tend not to know this is going on.\u00a0 But since many physics departments earn a signifcant part of their living by teaching premeds, we should probably be paying attention to this process.<\/p>\n

The main broad-brush recommendation in the report is to move away from specific lists of required courses and toward “competency” requirements.\u00a0 Medical schools should no longer say, “Thou shalt take two semesters of physics,” for instance, but rather should require that students can perform\u00a0 certain tasks.\u00a0 Part of the reason for this is to remove barriers to colleges that want to implement novel ways of teaching science, especially ways that emphasize interdisciplinarity:<\/p>\n

Organizing educational programs according to departmental priorities is a long-standing tradition in both undergraduate and professional education, but some institutions have begun to develop their educational program through an integrated, nondepartmental approach, and it is this approach the committee supports in its report.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That quote could have been talking about UR’s new Interdisciplinary Quantitative Science <\/a>course.\u00a0 During the development of the course, one thing we had to pay attention to was making sure that it checked all of the required pre-med boxes, and in particular that it would be evident from the transcript that students had had the required courses.\u00a0 For instance, since medical schools require two semesters of physics, and this course replaces one of those, we had to make sure that at least one unit’s worth of the course was listed in the transcript as Physics (in addition, of course, to making sure students actually learned the appropriate physics).<\/p>\n

Naturally, one of the first things I looked at in the document was how the proposed changes would affect the physics students would take.\u00a0 One of the eight “competencies” recommended for admission to medical school is<\/p>\n

Demonstrate knowledge of basic physical principles and their application to the understanding of living systems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is fleshed out with a bunch of “learning objectives”:<\/p>\n