Govt makes mess of the new GATE plan

We all know there is fierce competition for available places at that faculty. Quite often students with exceptionally good grades are told they have to wait for a year or more before they are accepted.

Students who have come out of secondary school with excellent grades in the humanities are asked to complete a pre-med programme called N1 — and to reapply based on their grades.

Those students who were successful in the sciences at the CAPE level, and whose acceptance to the Medical Faculty is deferred because of space constraints, often have to wait so long that they complete another programme of study while reapplying each year to med school.

The same happens to those who are refused entry because of unacceptable N1 grades. Both groups often end up waiting for four years or more, the time it takes to complete an entire degree programme while waiting to gain entry into medicine. A significant percentage of new medical students therefore already have a prior degree.

A case in point is a person whose family income is less than $10,000 a month. That individual finished a degree and went on to complete the N1 course, gaining As in all subjects.

This person, who comes from a single-parent home, was accepted to do medicine at the Mona Campus in Jamaica and applied for GATE based on this Government’s stated policy. That successful applicant was told he did not qualify for GATE since he was pursuing a “second degree”.

Medicine is an undergraduate and not a post-graduate degree programme. The decision with regard to discontinuing all funding for medical students at St George’s University (SGU) in Grenada with immediate effect is perplexing.

What adds to the confusion is the ministry’s “promise” to have existing students “transferred” to one of the UWI’s regional campuses where the ministry promises to continue funding the transferred student at a rate that is equivalent to that of existing students at the receiving campus.

This “promise” is altogether farcical and dishonest. I know from personal experience that inter-campus transfer of medical students already enrolled at one UWI regional medical school is all but impossible because of what its registrar described as “academic dissonance”. Each campus has its own programme. SGU is not at all affiliated with the UWI, so how is Education Minister Anthony Garcia going to effect such transfers? Furthermore, if the Government is promising to fund the affected student to the value that is the same as that of a student at a UWI campus, then why not simply continue to fund the student at the SGU but at a rate equivalent to a UWI student? Consistent with its history of backwardness and ineptitude, the PNM Government has made a complete mess of its ill thoughtout plan to rehash the GATE programme using arithmetic and not the principles of humane policy to rationalise its changes. Its focus as always is on numbers to the detriment of the real people those numbers represent.

Steve Smith via email