The Stigma Around Medical School Admission for Four-Digit Konkur Ranks Falls!

One of the options drawing the most attention these days is 'commitment-based medicine,' a pathway that makes medical school accessible to a broader group of applicants, but not at no cost.

According to Ambassador Arjan, "I'm sorry, what's wrong with Valadeh, that the rank of 7000 asks if it is possible to bring a doctor, and in the mentions they say yes?" This tweet by a user named "Hadith" may seem like an entrance exam joke at first glance, but behind this short sentence, an important change in the state of medical fields and the choices of entrance exam candidates can be seen.

Barterinha wrote in a news: Medicine, which was one of the most unattainable choices for the entrance exam for years, is now proposed for ranks that were once so far away from this field that they did not include it in their list of serious choices.

Part of the story goes back to increasing the medical admission capacity and of course different forms of admission. One of the options that is heard more these days is "commitment medicine"; A path that has made medicine accessible to a larger group of volunteers, but not without cost.

Obligatory medicine; Medicine with a big "but".

The story of commitment medicine is simple on the surface: a candidate with a rank that may not be sufficient for normal day-to-day medicine is accepted into a commitment-based field; But in return, he undertakes to serve in designated areas for a certain period of time after graduation. This is where the main difference shows itself. A person who is accepted as a regular doctor, after going through the education process and receiving the necessary licenses, has much more freedom to choose his place of work. But from the beginning, obligatory medicine ties a part of a person's future career to a specific area or place of service.

Commitment to service is not a joke. In some types of admission, the commitment period can be equivalent to one and a half times the study period or even more, and the place of service is also determined based on the criteria of the same admission. That is, a student who, for example, studies for seven years to become a doctor, may enter a period of compulsory service after graduation that will cover a significant part of the early years of his professional life. Moving and transferring is not necessarily available to a person like a normal doctor. Changing the place of service or transferring the commitment is subject to the regulations and approval of the relevant institutions, and it is not possible to enter this path from the beginning with the idea that later we will easily abandon the commitment and go to the city of our choice.

Even continuing education and some career decisions can be affected by this commitment. A person who chooses such a path, in fact, has traded part of the freedom to choose his future for the possibility of acceptance into medicine. Therefore, when it is said that "a rank of 7000 also brings medicine", an important point is usually missed: this rank does not necessarily mean acceptance into the same medicine that existed in the minds of previous generations of becoming a doctor.

A peak that is no longer as high as before

But the issue is not only about compulsory medicine. The most important thing is the change in the social status and entrance exam of this field. For many years, medicine for Iranian families was something like an entrance exam. Top ranks aimed for major medical choices, and ranks above a thousand usually had to calculate their chances more carefully, depending on the circumstances. Medicine was not just an academic discipline; It was a combination of income, social prestige, job security and prestige that made it the dream of a large part of volunteers.

But now the story has changed. Of course, this does not mean that medicine is worthless or that the path to becoming a doctor is easy. Medicine still has a long and difficult course of study, and after that, the path of specialization, plan, tests and long years of training and work are in front of the student. But the ugliness and exclusivity of "medicine only for the top ranks" has left.

Perhaps the strangest part of the story is this: a generation that once considered the rank of 7000 to be almost far from medicine, now has to discuss the question of what kind of acceptance and with what amount of commitment this rank can become a doctor. The issue is not only "what happened to the capacities". The bigger question is, what happened to one of the biggest dreams of Iran's entrance exam, that now even those with scores of several thousand can see themselves behind the doors of the medical school?