Which medical school you graduated from is irrelevant?

Two quotes from an article on the likely new GMC driven medical qualifying exam.

Richard Wakeford, a life fellow at the University of Cambridge who has researched medical assessment procedures, thinks that the Medical Schools Council may have accepted the inevitability of the introduction of a national licensing exam. But he believes that objections will still be raised to such an assessment. “I suspect that the really hostile medical schools will be the ones whose graduates include the least able ones and who will have to work like the devil to get them through a national test of any moderate severity,” he says.

and Krishna Kasaraneni, chair of the education, training, and workforce subcommittee of the BMA’s General Practitioners Committee says

Kasaraneni believes that the exam could help to raise standards among medical schools, but he is concerned that it could lead to the development of league tables for medical schools. “It will be overall a good thing, but there will be unintended consequences,” he says. “One of them will be about ranking medical schools and the stigma associated with that. The message that needs to come out is that all UK graduates and IMGs are assessed fairly and to the same standard. Where one graduated from is irrelevant.”

I am intrigued by Wakeford’s apparent certitude, but in total despair that people think it shouldn’t matter where you studied. Widget factories. So much for ambition, for both students, institutions and doctors.