Vanadium 50 said:
Which is not relevant to the question at hand. Nobody is saying grades are all there is. You're setting up a straw man.
You misunderstand my point: the practical expertise is part of the latter grading, therefore a failed or dismal prior grade should not get in the way of getting an actual final grading. Failing rigourously those who do not meet the prior grade, makes it impossible for them to get the latter grade, which may be problematic in multiple ways, especially if this halting justification is severely lacking.
Unless it is absolutely straightforward that what comes next requires a level of mastery of the prior, I think there is in many cases an argument for leniency. This is not just some hypothetical argument: there is an actual epidemic going on in many fields where this has caused an 'invisible' unwanted selection effect, where those who are inherently better at some task are predominantly removed because they do not meet some irrelevant standard for getting to that task.
The reason for this is that the prior skills and latter skills usually have no correlation, or stronger an anti-correlation, causing the strict selection to remove those most talented in the latter, while retaining those more talented in the former; this when there is actually demand for the latter both by the profession and by society itself. The natural solution to this is to change the curriculum, which often occurs with a new school of thought or specialization coming about which has a different focus than the prior school.
This scenario occurred in late 20th century medicine in many European countries, after which curricula were changed in such a way to remove this selection bias which was based on getting certain grades within certain arbitrary timespans, before any other grades could be attempted; if the latter grades which are gotten are better than average, the prior ones may be retaken, sometimes indefinitely. Education research then demonstrates the pros and cons of these different education strategies and post-market surveillance measures differences in the quality of output, i.e. these decisions are made scientifically instead of based on tradition or convention.
Even stronger, actual research has shown that after the latter grades are taken successfully there is often an experience-based component causing the majority of those who pass these to automatically pass the retake of the prior grades while those who originally pass tend to score lower on the latter, implying the latter is in some sense logically almost a prerequisite for the former. Convincing people to change education strategies however is a nightmare, e.g. just look at ##\pi## versus ##\tau##.
A too strong focus on the prior short-term results over the long-term ones is therefore a decision which requires much more caution. Unluckily these decisions are often made by glorified administrators, who can moreover be corrupted by focusing on maximizing certain performance indicators in order to get government money, instead of education or progression of their field. Quality of education is a very elastic concept depending on just who you ask, e.g. just ask different experts about certain textbooks.
This argument is also not particular to medicine, but to any subject/school where there is no clear connection between the prior and latter subjects and yet the prior grades function as a gateway to the latter, often due to convention or tradition. There is a strong argument to make that this 'invisible' unwanted selection effect has also actually occurred in theoretical physics due to the 20th century professionalization of science by forecefully moving the major schools from Europe to America.
