I guess my question is, if your body has built-in superpowers like Bluetooth or infrared vision or auxilary information storage, why would it be illegal to use them if it would make you a better doctor?
Maybe the tests are not testing the right skills.
As a patient I want to see the best doctor possible, and if they have retrofitted their bodies to be more competent at treating conditions I would totally want that.
Your assumption is that these cheating students will continue to have an enabler with them through their entire career.
Furthermore, your assumption is that a cheater will be the best doctor. It's not about the method - it's about the integrity. My assumption is that any person taking shortcuts like this to get their degree will also take shortcuts with my personal health, which is not a comforting thought.
The scenario in the article is very different than a potential doctor being upfront about having implants installed to aid them in their duties.
>it's about the integrity. My assumption is that any person taking shortcuts like this to get their degree will also take shortcuts with my personal health, which is not a comforting thought.
You're making generalizations based on proxy information, which is basically the same thing that a test does you're just using a different set of information to key off of.
Not that there isn't some signal in the pile of noise that you're picking through but a willingness to circumvent academic requirements isn't exactly a strong indicator of performance in the field. Competent professionals fudge requirements they consider to be irrelevant all the time (inb4 no true Scotsman).
> Competent professionals fudge requirements they consider to be irrelevant all the time (inb4 no true Scotsman).
That's because they know more than the people who wrote the requirements, because the requirements were written 15 years ago when the medical profession as a whole knew a lot less about $INSERT_CONDITION_HERE.
You'll also notice that those requirements are explicitly written to permit fudging. “Two or more of the below”, “most of these”, “one or more”, “or other reason” etc..
Because Bluetooth is not superpower; the cheating part is the other end of the communication feeding information to the student. They won't be there when the doctor is treating you.
Real doctors can already use external information anyway. They just use the computer, no need to Bluetooth themselves.
A bluetooth implant alone doesn’t help that much. To be effective the scam requires more, e.g. continuous assistance from a third party. Will that doctor employ a third party afterwards, i.e. for all duration of their practice?
For instance, as a counter example, if you wired your brain up to a hard drive loaded with an immense amount of medical data that you'd be able to access at will for the rest of your life (instead of learning most of that rote knowledge through traditional sources) I wouldn't consider that cheating. Assuming you're still sufficiently good at critical thinking and problem solving then I wouldn't really have any objection to a doctor who keeps his knowledge of the krebs cycle on an instantly accessible external storage device.
I would expect some of this exam is not about rote information but requires actual problem solving. E.g.: patient has XYZ symptoms, what is your diagnosis?
By analogy, bringing all the printed books or hard drives you want into a chess match might help you with the opening, but not the rest of the game. These days there are chess engines, but before that, cheating required a human accomplice who was a good player, who knew what was on your board and could tell you the right move. My old club had an incident of a guy doing that using hand signals.
Now they won't let you bring any devices at all into chess tournaments, even mechanical wristwatches. A pity. Garry Kasparov famously used to fidget with his watch while playing. You could tell how good his game was by noticing whether the watch was on his wrist or on the table.
Treating any sort of complex medical condition requires a physician to actually understand the biochemistry, including interactions between multiple pathways. Having ready access to reference sources isn't sufficient. This is why medical schools involve a lot more than rote memorization.
So if your doctor spent sufficient time studying those complex interactions and didn't waste time on the rote memorization - would you consider them ill-equipped? If this student's learning could be more focused on the problem solving side of things would you think they'd make a worse doctor?
A competent physician needs to spend sufficient time on rote memorization and then use that as a foundation to understand complex interactions. This is why medical school and residency takes so long. There are no good shortcuts.
This is an apples to oranges comparison of course - but good developers spend time in university learning a whole bunch of theory and problem solving and almost nothing on rote learning (outside of how to find information which is a skill - while the information you're finding isn't one).
Perhaps the medical field is radically different - but I'd wager there's a whole lot of benefit that's been delivered to healthcare by giving doctors access to the internet so they don't need to focus so much of their time on trying to recall vague facts from twenty years prior in school and residencies.
Many specialties in the medical field are radically different. Physicians simply don't have time to look things up during a typical 10 minute outpatient encounter, or in the middle of a surgical procedure. The time pressure is just way more intense than what most developers ever deal with.
Who doesn't want their own Personal Doctor Feelgood, who prescribes as much Adderall as you can Snort, lets you Dictate Glowing Health Letters, refers you to a Bone Spur Specialist who gets you out of Being Drafted, shoots you up with Penicillin whenever it Hurts When You Pee, then awards you a Purple Heart for getting wounded by Vagina Landmines in your Own Personal Viet Nam?
Maybe the tests are not testing the right skills.
As a patient I want to see the best doctor possible, and if they have retrofitted their bodies to be more competent at treating conditions I would totally want that.