h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If theyt're trying to choose people with the right sort of clinical and diagnostic intelligence to perform as doctors, surely the test should be conducted under realistic conditions?

For example, systematically starve the individual of sleep and adequate rest for up to four days straight. Give them a very loud bleeper, allow them to drop into a deep sleep for half an hour or so after three days' deprivation, then ring the bleeper to call them to the exam room. Then make them sit the test. If they can still pass after that, then they are fit to work as junior hospital doctors.

Or drag the university medical students out of their favoured pub at half-past eleven. Have them take the test while pi$$ed as rats.
If they can pass, then they're doctors. Simple and effective.

Hmmm. Have they forgotten asbout this post, which was meant as a general observation on medical and nursing students in their natural environment, ie down the uni pub getting bladdered?

Hence the most honest reply to a doctor or nurse asking how much you smoke or drink - "probably a lot less than you" or "Definitely less than the average for doctors!" or "Didn't I see you falling over in that nightclub at one in the morning, you and that nurses' hen night?"