Nearly half of all students at UCLA’s medical school, known as one of the best in the world, fail basic tests of medical competence, a new report has revealed. Many are attributing the school’s fall from grace to its agressive acceptance of less-qualified minority candidates.
The report, released today by the Washington Free Beacon, stated that the rates of failure on “shelf” exams (standardized tests that cover a number of issues including emergency medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, and other specializations), have increased tenfold at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine since 2022.
In some of the cohorts admitted since then, more than 50% of students have failed some of the shelf exams. This is despite the fact that nationally, only 5% of students fail.
A number of professors, members of staff, and members of the admissions committee, spoke anonymously with the Free Beacon. One professor told the outlet that a student failed to identify a major artery, and then shouted at them for even asking them the question to begin with. Another claimed that students at the end of their medical rotation couldn’t even comprehend basic lab tests, or present patients.
“I don’t know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors,” the professor said. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”
The blame for the failures has been attributed to the arrival of Jennifer Lucero as the Dean of Admissions in 2020. Lucero allegedly prioritized the admission Black and Latino admissions over white and Asian applicants, rather than basing acceptance on competency. This practice has been occurring even though California has explicitly banned public schools from considering race on admissions since 1996.
According to at least six members of staff that spoke to the Free Beacon, Lucero attacked anyone who questioned the qualifications or grades of minority candidates, and claimed that anyone doing so was racist.
In a notable incident in 2021, Lucero exploded at an admissions officer who voiced concern over the qualifications of a Black applicant.
“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” she reportedly snapped. “We need people like this in the medical school.”
One Native American applicant was rejected in 2021, the sources claimed, which then resulted in a two hour lecture by Lucero’s own sister to the admissions board, instead of vetting any more potential candidates.
According to two sources present at a February 2022 meeting, Lucero argued that a highly qualified white man should be bumped down multiple spots on the admission list because “we have too many of his kind,” in favor of a Hispanic applicant who had “performed poorly” on her anesthesiology rotation in medical school.
One former member of the admissions staff said that such admissions had resulted in UCLA becoming a “failed medical school,” adding: “We want racial diversity so badly, we’re willing to cut corners to get it.”
Since 2020, UCLA dropped from 6th to 18th place in the US News and World Report’s rankings for medical research. Ironically, the number of Asian applicants fell by almost a third from 2019 to 2022, with no other California school seeing such a decline.
In 2020, the entire university condensed its preclinical curriculum from two years to one, in order to “add more time for research and community service,” according to the report, a decision that allegedly compounded the already problematic admissions issues. First year students must now spend between three to four hours every two weeks studying “Structural Racism and Health Equity,” covering topics such as “fatphobia,” along with seven hours a week in another class that includes units on “interpersonal communication skills.”
In April, one professor claimed that the new curriculum was a “colossal failure,” arguing that it rendered the students “grossly unprepared for clinical rotations.”
