Affirmative Action and Incompetent Doctors

[John in Woodbridge]

Affirmative action kills. I just came across the New York Times obituary for Patrick Chavis, one of the five medical students whose race gave them admission over Bakke in the famous case.

In 1996, Senator Edward M. Kennedy called him a "perfect example" of how affirmative action worked. "... The University of California at Davis has no records of what the four blacks admitted with Dr. Chavis are doing, a spokeswoman, Julia Ann Easley, said. By 1996, Dr. Chavis was using liposuction to help women lose weight after giving birth. He was accused of mistreating eight liposuction patients, one of whom died. In 1998, the Medical Board of California revoked his license for "gross negligence, incompetence and repeated negligent acts."

His professional difficulties began in 1993, at Long Beach Memorial Hospital, when he was accused of mishandling a delivery, and the hospital began monitoring him.

He sued, charging racism. In a jury trial, he won $1.1 million in damages, but a judge overturned the verdict. By 1997, he said he had delivered 10,000 children and performed thousands of abortions. About that time, he added liposuction to his practice. His personal and professional life then took a further downturn. In 1997, The Associated Press found in court records that he had been sued 21 times for malpractice and had settled some suits with no admission of guilt.

He declared bankruptcy and went through the second of two divorces. In 1997, his license was suspended, for not paying child support, but he continued to practice. The medical board used that as one of more than 90 counts in revoking his license the next year...

http://rasmusen1.blogspot.com/2009/1...competent.html

[cillian]

A perfect example alright.

[The Bobster]

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/090406_graduate_school.htm

Graduate School Admissions, Race, And The White Status Game
By Steve Sailer

All across the country, applicants to graduate and professional schools have been receiving fat letters of acceptance or thin letters of rejection.

They have a right to feel nervous. They’ve sweated through college and through rigorous standardized exams, which they hope will open the door to their chosen professions. But the prestigious postgrad programs are ruthless about selecting the best candidates (at least if they are white or Asian). So, applicants obsess over whether their 165 LSATK-12 education or 680 GMAT is good enough to get in.

But, paradoxically, the faculty of the top schools seldom preaches what they practice when it comes to K-12 education or immigration. They are fiercely selectionist about who they let in to their institutions. Yet they lecture American citizens about how we should be lax about whom we let in to our country.

There is much that can be learned from the study of average test scores from the major postgrad exams. The idiosyncratic scoring systems do make them seem impenetrable to outsiders, but fortunately, they are all graded on the bell curve, so I’ve come up with a handy table that makes them easy to understand.

I’ve accumulated recent data on the average scores by race for five exams: the GRE for grad school, the LSAT for law school, the MCAT for medical school, the GMAT for business school, and the DAT for dental school.

To make all the numbers comprehensible, I’ve converted them to show where the mean for each race would fall in percentile terms relative to the distribution of scores among non-Hispanic white Americans. Most of us have some sense of what the distribution of talent is among whites—political correctness doesn’t demand we avert our eyes when it comes to whites—so I’ll use whites as benchmarks.

Mean Score as Percentile of White Distribution

Test Degree Year White Black Asian Tot Hisp Mex-Am

GMAT M.B.A. 2008 50% 13% 55% 27% 24%

GRE-Verbal Ph.D./M.A. 2007 50% 18% 47% 29% 28%

GRE-Quant 2007 50% 14% 66% 29% 28%

LSAT J.D. 2006 50% 12% 47% 19% 29%

MCAT-Verbal M.D. 2007 50% 10% 36% 19% 21%

MCAT-Phys Sci 2007 50% 14% 61% 24% 25%

MCAT-Biol Sci 2007 50% 10% 54% 24% 25%

DAT D.D.S. 2005 50% 16% 60% 27% NA


Thus, for example, on the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), the gatekeeper for the M.B.A. degree, the mean score for whites falls, by definition, at the 50th percentile of the white distribution of scores. The mean score for black test-takers would rank at the 13th percentile among whites. Asians average a little better than the typical white, scoring at the 55th percentile.

Most of these tests break out separate nationalities among Hispanics. Thus, my table has columns both for “Total Hispanics” (27th percentile on the GMAT) and “Mexican-Americans” (24th percentile). In the 2000 Census, Mexicans made up 58 percent of the Total Hispanic population.

I listed the subtest scores for the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) because the sources didn’t aggregate them.

Note that language is a surprisingly small problem for Hispanics—they score no worse on the GRE Verbal subtest than on the GRE Quantitative, and only moderately worse on Verbal portion of the MCAT. Why? Because Hispanics who have problems with English generally don’t finish college, or even high school.

As you’ll note, the black average scores are consistently low across all five tests, plus the listed subtests. The scores for Asian Americans are generally good, but they bounce around depending upon the balance of verbal vs. quantitative / visual questions. The Total Hispanic and Mexican-American scores are dependably mediocre—better than blacks, worse than whites.

[Leah Smith]

Over the years I have seen dental work done by an Affirmative Action Dentist. It is scary to see what he did to his patients, unaware of the fact the dental work he did was bordering malpractice. It took him an extra two years to pass the boards and most likely they passed him just to get rid of him. Lucky for his patients he is no longer practicing.

[John MacMillan]

There are a scary amount of nigger doctors at my local practice. All of them are women, too. In fact out of 12 doctors, only one is a man. I believe he is jewish, so he really doesn't count. Where are all the White, male doctors?