TWO DESIRABLE REFORMS.

Reforms

Extrapolating to our specialty, and having been examiner for both M.Ch and the DNB exit exams, at various places, I find that there is a huge difference in the standard and the conduct of these exams. I believe that the MCI is also trying to standardize exit exams, but we as a specialty and as the apex body of that specialty, should put together a standardized exit exam, to be passed by all can...

Effects of the Calman reforms: a two year review.

The recommendations of a working party set up to ensure that the procedure for UK specialist certification complied with European law (the Calman report) have had implications that extend beyond the immediate concerns over abbreviated training into every area of paediatric practice—hospital and community, district general hospital, and tertiary centre. Proponents of the reforms promised that mo...

Two backlashes: targeted reforms and supply chain management.

Commentary: Is disfluency desirable?

For good reasons, the results reported by Diemand-Yauman et al. (2011), accompanied by the clever title, BFortune favors the bold (and the italicized): effects of disfluency on educational outcomes,^ have had a big impact, not only among researchers, but also in the public media. First, from a common-sense standpoint, why should making to-be-learned materials harder to read by virtue of a more-...

Desirable scientific conduct.

M any scientists are aware of the subtle influences on their own scientific conduct, but many others are not. Sydney Brenner, the joint winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, delightfully described a slide in which data points were scattered very close to a straight line— but a large mysterious black object lay in one corner. By degrees, the onlooker realizes that the object...