INFORMATION LITERACY
Contemporary society depends on applying quantitative reasoning, statistics, and computational methods to global, scientific, or technological challenges. Does quantification empower us as citizens of the United States and the world? The usage, creation, distribution, manipulation, and integration of information is a significant activity in the modern economy. The G7 group of nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) recognize that "progress in information technologies and communication is changing the way we live: how we work and do business, how we educate our children, study and do research, train ourselves, and how we are entertained. The information society is not only affecting the way people interact but it is also requiring the traditional organizational structures to be more flexible, more participatory and more decentralized."
The impacts of the information society are profound. Maintenance and transformation of intellectual resources is in many ways as important as the transformation of material resources. Evaluating the quality of information, using using information effectively, and making contextually appropriate choices in source material are bedrock skills of twenty-first century artists, managers, scientists, health care workers, design thinkers, academics, and all other people who "think for a living."
Navigating Complexity: Understanding Regional Boundaries in East Asia
Regan Elmore
Regional lines include the Middle East, Oceania, and my focus, East Asia. Regional boundaries, on the other hand, are physical barriers that constrict the entering or leaving of a specific region. This would also include differences in biomes and changes in geographical features that were consistent throughout the region. Two examples in Europe are the Pyrenees mountains that separate France and Spain, and the Alps mountains that separate France and Italy. In the context of geography, the field of study looks at regional divisions through three different lenses: physical geography like land masses and climates to describe regional boundaries, human geography which pertains to how humans interact and use the environment like urban development, and finally environmental geography which is a combination of physical and human and focuses on how humans look at nature and conceptualize it to describe regional lines. Anthropology looks at cultural similarities in activities or lifestyles that are observed, as well as proximity to determine regional lines. Political science views a region as an area that has political unity under a specific governing body that uses a set of rules understood by the people of that area. Finally, history defines a region as an area that at some point shared at least one of the aforementioned characteristics even if they were not geographically close. Each of these disciplines provides an example of how difficult it is to pinpoint an exact definition of what a region is, thus leading to difficulty in defining the regional lines for East Asia. If a line cannot be drawn for determining what we would consider within a region like the Sinosphere, regional lines around the world would potentially need to be redrawn and could threaten alliances, world order, trading, and territorial lines. Within East Asia, realizing global effects can provide a deeper sense of the region and potentially further delineate Japan, North and South Korea, as being their distinctive region.
Only Time Will Tell
Jake Pinello
The 2020 Presidential election is finally over. President Elect Joe Biden ousted sitting President Donald Trump by an electoral score of 306 to 232. Once again, the statisticians and political pollsters failed miserably at predicting how the election would play out. The winner of the election was about the only thing that the political analysts got right, as the popular vote was substantially closer than expected, the margins of victory in states that were predicted to go heavily in Biden’s favor were much smaller, and many of the states that Democrats believed they might flip went convincingly the other way.
Whether or not the polling industry will be able to recover from two consecutive disastrous campaign seasons is still yet to be seen. What we are seeing is the response of Donald Trump. It is — as many things with Trump are — unprecedented action never before seen from a presidential candidate and sitting president. He and his team have made bold claims that fraudulent processes during the 2020 election are the sole reason that Joe Biden came out on top. This is an issue that has further divided the country, as a growing number of Americans believe that our system is rigged and that the political elite will always prevail. While I have my own thoughts on the lack of evidence that is accompanying these possibly very consequential claims, I want to focus more on what sort of effect it could have moving forward. I also want to talk about how we can learn from all of this and what changes we need to be willing to make as a result of that knowledge.
First and foremost, it is important to note that despite all of the legal cases being brought to court in regard to the 2020 election, Joe Biden will be sworn into office on Inauguration Day. There are few or no routes that Trump can take to change the result of the election, due to constitutional restraints as well as Democratic control of key positions where intervention would be guaranteed. I also admit that everything (as far as we know) that Donald Trump is currently doing is completely within his legal right and that it will have no effect on who our next president is. With all of that in mind, I believe that the psychological effects that his response could have on the American public are potentially devastating. In order to see how this could go badly, we must first touch on a few basic principles of a democracy, and more specifically, American democracy.
As the first perfecter and champion of democracy, the UnitedStates’ elections have been the envy of the world. The entire globe generally believes that come the end of the Tuesday after the first Monday of November, the person who is declared the winner of the American Presidential Election is chosen through the will of the millions of Americans exercising their fundamental right to vote. This is the absolute core of democracy in America. It is what gives people faith in the government, it is what enables the peaceful transfer of power that helps ensure the American people hold the power, and it allows people to have a legitimate say in the business of their country.
When a sitting president refuses to concede due to claims of fraud, despite a complete lack of evidence, that core of democracy in American is in danger. Trump ally and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said it best on a primetime special on ABC News a few days after the election. He said that if Trump’s claims of fraud are true, then both sides of the political spectrum should be outraged. The only bigger threat to democracy than false claims of fraudulent elections are true claims of fraudulent elections. If there is election fraud, it should be handled seriously. Christie went onto say that the issue with what the president is claiming is that he is offering no evidence of these things. He used the phrase “inflammation without information” to describe what Trump was doing and said that it was completely unacceptable.
Fast forward to today, and according to an Associate Press tally of roughly 50 cases that have been brought to court, more than 30 have been rejected, about a dozen are still awaiting action, and only one (small) victory has been achieved. These numbers are not creating a very optimistic outlook in the Republican camp, and many would argue that their lack of success means these actions are relatively harmless. The findings from polls done by Reuters/Ipsos and POLITICO/Morning Consultsuggest otherwise. The first number that really took me back from the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll was that they found 70% of Republicans do not believe that the 2020 Election was free and fair. This number is up from 35% prior to the election, suggesting that the fraudulent claims being thrown around by the Trump campaign could have played a role in the doubling of how many Republicans have faith that the election was free and fair.
The next number, this one from the Reuters/Ipsos poll, that is concerning is that about half of the Republicans polled believe that Donald Trump “rightfully won” the 2020 Election and that Joe Biden’s victory was dependent on widespread voter fraud. Almost half of one of the two major parties in power in the United States believe that our sacred free and fair elections are no longer free and fair. There have been a number of credible, independent sources that have said this election was one of the most secure elections in American history. There has been no success in the courts, even ones with Trump-appointed judges. The claims being made at rallies by lawyers like Rudy Giuliani do not match the claims that are being made by the same lawyers when they are under oath in the courts. So that makes us wonder, why do so many people have doubts about the security of this election? The basic answer is that people are irrational.
We have seen the power that baseless claims made by Donald Trump have had on people across America over the last four years, so why are we surprised to find the same is happening with his baseless claims of election fraud? That would be because Donald Trump is just as much a psychological danger to the country as he is a political danger. People believe in him, and when you believe in someone, they have the unrestrained ability to take advantage of that belief for their own benefit. That is why we are where we are.
Something that I do want to also address is the broader lesson that we must take away from the Donald Trump Era. While I admittedly do not approve of a large number of things that Donald Trump has done to our country, I do believe that he has done something very important for the United States moving forward. In Texas this year, it looked as though Joe Biden might actually have a chance at turning the state blue. Although Biden performed relatively close to how they expected him to in Texas, he still fell 5.6 percentage points behind Trump when all the ballots were counted. What was the cause of this disparity? Trump received almost one million more votes in Texas this year than he did four years ago against Hillary Clinton. This massive gain in votes suggests that many of these voters are people who would not typically participate in the election. This means that the pollsters, who attempt to get the feelings of expected voters, would have underweighted the magnitude of this increase in Republican turnout.
That means that Donald Trump has re-enfranchised a large number of voters who have been silenced and overlooked in recent history. These people are just as American as anyone else, and they deserve the right to be heard. The existence of Trump might have been what was needed to get these people representation in their government, and for that, I give credit to Trump. At the end of the day, all of these predictions and analyses are hypothetical. It’s impossible to truly know what the long-term effects of the political issues of today will have on the conversations of tomorrow.
With that in mind, talking about possible complications and consequences of actions being taken today can help us to minimize the negative effects that they might have tomorrow. I hope, for the sake of our great nation, that I am completely wrong. I fear, based off the numbers of the two aforementioned polls and what I am witnessing around the country today, that the relief felt following the Biden victory caused by an expected return to political normalcy will be short lived and that we will be faced with disruptive political tension for years to come. Only time will tell.
Hopefulness and Hypercompetitiveness
Simon Anderson
Prospective medical students must be the best of the best among their classmates. The pressure that this places on undergraduate students is well-known to have detrimental effects on their health. Even though we all know that we must put pressure on ourselves in order to succeed, I thought it might be worthwhile to explain just what a medical student faces in their transition from undergraduate studies to medical school.
Below I have completed an analysis of trends in MCAT scores since 2003 (Note: the data for 2014 and 2015, the year preceding and the year of the addition of social science and psychology to the MCAT, are largely missing, or presented in such a way that it may not be appropriate to directly compare it to the data from the other years. This is also the reason for the exclusion of the data from 2000 to 2002.) I have chosen the MCAT as my means for analysis because it is a staple of the medical student’s career. It is the moment that immutably solidifies a student’s dedication to practicing medicine, and it is likely the determining factor in some students’ acceptance to medical school. As I proceeded through my investigation, the first thing I noticed was the rapidly growing number of students who take the MCAT every year. Below is a graph that traces the number of students that have taken the MCAT every year between 2003 and 2014, and from 2016 to the first part of 2020.
There have been more and more students taking the test annually for nearly two decades. Since the introduction of the new MCAT, the number of students taking the test has skyrocketed: 268,493 tests were completed between May 1, 2019 and April 30, 2020, versus only 64,504 in the 2016-17 cycle and 150,893 in the 2017-18 cycle. Medical schools can only take so many of these students. The trend of the graph above suggests that by the time I take the MCAT – the 2021-22 cycle – there will be over 300,000 students competing for these places. Just the top 20% of test-takers will be equal to the entire number of students who took the MCAT in the 2016-17 cycle. The sheer number of prospective medical students already poses fierce competition. A student will need to out-score several tens of thousands of students to be even remotely competitive.
The next most useful analysis was that of the mean score. Because the old and new tests are graded on different scales, they have been separated into two different graphs.
Both tests had an upward trend in the mean score over the years they have been administered. This shows that pre-medical students as a whole are scoring higher. By 2022, the mean will likely be around 502 points, much higher than the 500-point ideal designated for the test. What this trend indicates is that students are consistently scoring higher than expected on the exam, which means that future students will have to continually score higher and higher to be competitive applicants.The next comparison I made was between the 25th, 50th (the median), 75th, 90th, and the minimum score to be in the 100th percentile. These data points provide information on the number of students who score in a certain range. In the cases where the scores required to reach a percentile did not fall on a whole number, I used the formula below to estimate them.
“Basescore” refers to the score that one would have to achieve to be on the low bound of whatever range contains the percentile. Compiling the data resulted in the two graphs below.
The left graph, depicting the old exam, shows no discernable pattern in the scores needed to achieve a given percentile. However, the right graph – the new exam – shows a clear upward trend for all percentiles. It also shows that the 75th percentile is moving towards the 90th percentile, indicating that 15% of test-takers in that percentile range are scoring higher and higher every year. The upward trend in every line shows us that the entire distribution of scores is moving upwards, requiring that pre-medical students at every level of proficiency must keep improving their scores, or else they will fall to the bottom of the score curve and be overlooked by medical schools. If the requirements for the 75th and 90th percentiles keep increasing at this rate, I would need to score a 510 to be in the top 25% of applicants and a 515 to be in the top 10%; decidedly greater than the 507 and 513 needed in 2015. Next, I compared the mode and median of each score distribution to their average scores. A mode that is higher than the mean (a positive Mode-Mean) or a mean that is lower than both the median and mode (a positive Median-Mean), indicates that the distribution of scores is skewed towards higher scores. The Mode-Mean data is generally more telling than the Median-Mean data, however.
The Mode-Mean data was positive for virtually all of the years studied. Therefore, these two graphs show that consistently more students scored higher on both versions of the MCAT, though by how much was more variable in the old test. The new MCAT has seen a more consistent growth in how far above the mean a large number of students score. The graphs demonstrate that not only will prospective medical students have to score above the mean, but they will have to score above the mean by a considerable margin to out-compete the many other students who score above the mean.
The final analysis I conducted was more visual in nature. In the plots below, taken directly from the MCAT score reports, I show how the distribution of scores has changed over time.
The differences in score distribution between the oldest and newest exams, both for the old MCAT and the new, are obvious. The “hump” of each distribution migrates to the right with each exam cycle. This is clear visual evidence that more test-takers are scoring better on each exam. To remain a competitive applicant, one must stay on the leading edge of the curve. As the curve migrates to the right, so too must the students’ scores get higher and higher to keep them in the running for admission to medical school.
In summary, my findings are bleak for future generations of pre-medical students. The scores students will be expected to have will be higher, and the ever-increasing number of students taking the test means that the scores that will make a student competitive will be even higher than that. The inevitable result is that pre-medical students will have to go beyond intense dedication to their studies; they will have to develop a feeling of hypercompetitiveness against their colleagues. Every success for one pre-medical student is just another point that some other student will have to be earned on the MCAT to remain a competitive applicant. While the mental, emotional, and possibly physical toll this kind of academic fierceness will have on students – not to mention how the hypercompetitive attitude will affect interpersonal relations – is obvious, the solution remains elusive. How is it possible to assure students’ readiness for medical school, but still keep them hopeful that they will be admitted regardless of a single test score?
The humanities-focused aspects of my Independent Scholars major will no doubt set me apart from the rest of the applicants I will compete against for admission, but how much will that lower the MCAT score I need to succeed? Furthermore, if all pre-medical students included person-focused study in their undergraduate curriculum, we would all be on level footing again, with the MCAT being the sole determining factor in admission in many cases. In this piece I have laid bare the trends in MCAT competitiveness that have developed in the past two decades. However, the issue of the resulting hypercompetitive students is one for which I have no answer. It is entirely possible that there isn’t one, and that I should merely feel fortunate that the scores I need and the number of students I will be competing against will be lower than that of future cohorts.
Sources
Data for 2000-2013: https://students-residents.aamc.org/advisors/article/percentages-and-scaled-score-tables/
Data for 2014: https://students-residents.aamc.org/content/downloadable/884/
Data for May 1, 2015 to April 30, 2020: https://students-residents.aamc.org/advisors/article/historical-percentile-ranks-new-exam/