From now on, Cuban students will be able to enter medical school without taking entrance exams: "emerging doctors"?
The Cuban government has decided to eliminate entrance exams for students wishing to train as doctors, generating a wave of criticism and concern about the future quality of health professionals.
Good grades in eleventh grade will suffice.
A recent publication of the University of Medical Sciences of Holguin revealed that students who finish tenth grade with an average of at least 90 points, and maintain that grade in the first semester of eleventh grade, will be able to go directly to the twelfth grade within the medical university and, after completing it, enter the career without tests.
With this decision, the Ministry of Public Health is launching a plan to create university colleges within the medical faculties themselves. The declared objective: to accelerate the training of health personnel in a country where doctors are in short supply and many have been sent abroad.
Minimum requirements and new exceptions
According to the announcement, in addition to academic performance, applicants are required to be "physically and mentally fit". For those who opt for Nursing, those with penicillin allergy are also excluded.
Flexibilization is not new. In Havana, this modality had already been applied in 2024 in the Julio Trigo and Enrique Cabrera faculties. However, this is the first time that its expansion to other provinces has been formalized without the need to take exams.
"A career that demands rigor cannot be given away."
Journalist Yosmany Mayeta was one of the first to react to this measure, pointing out in his social networks that the country is creating "emerging doctors for a country without medicine". His publication generated hundreds of reactions in social networks, many of them critical.
"Who are we entrusting our lives to now?" wrote one user. "The problem is not just that the race is given away, it's what knowledge they will have and how many mistakes they will make," added another.
Many remembered that in the past they had to "break their eyelashes" in order to aspire to a place in Medicine. Now, the career seems to be given without effort, which raises doubts about the academic level with which future doctors will graduate.
This is not the only relaxation
For the past two years, the Ministry of Higher Education has been allowing access to university careers to students who did not pass, or even did not take the entrance exams. At the time, Minister Walter Baluja assured that this "did not mean a loss of quality", but the opposing voices have not ceased to grow.
The new measure is an attempt to respond to the massive exodus of Cuban doctors, which has left hospitals with incomplete staffs, closed clinics and unfilled shifts. But the remedy may be expensive.
Critics of this policy fear that, in the medium term, the quality of health services will plummet even further, and that the country will depend on poorly trained professionals who came to medicine without real academic filters.
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until about the 1980s, no career in cubic tennis had an entrance exam.
myself in 1977, just because of my grades, I enrolled WITHOUT ENTRY TESTS.
another barbarity. one of the careers that should have entrance exams and a high ranking should be medina. people's lives are in the hands of these future doctors and with today's lampesima.educacion we are guaranteed death.
It is really the climax of the decadence that the entrance to the career of medical sciences has been presenting for years, and soon it will be forbidden to get sick, especially to the long-lived majority. What explanation will they give to the hundreds of adults today, young people with aspirations and a much more solid preparation, of the end of the 80's that for tenths in rigorous entrance exams saw their dreams frustrated and without options?
I respect different opinions, but from my point of view, not taking entrance exams is not the problem. There are many very good students who over the years for different reasons have not achieved a career. What they have to guarantee is a good formation already inside the university, being so, at the end there will be only those who are really qualified to practice.
The truth is that they should take advantage and remove the tests also to the distance and meeting courses. Although they are of general culture.
Now it will be certified as the career of the tonga, lots of students without preparation and without vocation, not to mention that many of the averages today are given away for free. Nor can it be denied that there are excellent students who are in the minority. I only know that the future of our health is at stake.
All students entering careers in Cuba have 12 grades. The entrance exams are intended for ranking purposes only. Those who achieve the best ranking will choose the career they like the most according to their results. That is why you do not always need to take an entrance exam to enter a career if you do not need to compete. A press conference will be held to explain this. A student with an average of 90 is a good student and the University College within the University of Medical Sciences prepares them better for their 12th grade and strengthens their professional vocation. So we will have good professionals.
No matter what they say, of course the quality is going to be affected… do you remember when the country trained emergency teachers??? Today we are paying dearly for that mistake, with middle-level students who arrive at the university increasingly less prepared… the future of such a sensitive sector as health cannot be put at risk.