Medical watchdog Do No Harm released a report Tuesday that it says shows how the quality of medical students’ reports has deteriorated, becoming more “weak” and more focused on politicized topics since letter grades were terminated.

Report Findings

Director of research at Do No Harm Dr. Jay Greene told The Center Square: “Without the use of the letter-grade system, students are searching for other ways to stand out for fellowships and residency programs.” This has “inevitably led to an arms race in publications authored by medical students,” Greene said. “To compound the problem, quantity is incentivized over quality – leading to shoddy research and focus on politicized topics,” Greene said.

According to Do No Harm’s report, “low-quality medical student–authored research has increased over the last two decades, corresponding with medical schools’ elimination of letter grades.” The report also noted the rise in “politicized” or “woke” research from these medical students. Between 2000 and 2013, only 26 out of the 408 articles (six percent) published by medical students contained at least one “woke term” such as “equity,” “disparities,” “social,” “justice,” “race,” “racist,” “racism,” “diversity,” or “inclusion.” Between 2021 and 2025, this jumped to 21%, with “a fifth…of medical-student publications [having] at least one woke term in their title or abstract,” the report said.

Do No Harm concluded that “the quality of medical-student publications is actually declining as the volume is increasing.” One solution Do No Harm’s report gave to the issue of medical student publications is reversing the shift that was made to pass/fail grading. Two other solutions include “capping the number of publications students can list on residency applications” or “encouraging residency-program directors to pay more attention to the quality of publications.”

Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.