The health sector is not just another job field. Here, a single wrong decision, incomplete knowledge, or an unfeeling hand is directly intertwined with human life. Yet today, we are facing a reality where the main filter for entering this sector is gradually becoming ineffective.
The standard of exam questions has fallen so low that thorough preparation, subject-based understanding, or years of dedicated hard work often become meaningless. Instead, the person who, with comparatively shaky preparation, can simply keep a ‘cool nerve’ in the exam hall becomes the one who passes. This reality is not just a candidate’s personal failure—it’s a warning of a looming disaster for the entire health system.
Where is the problem?
When questions no longer judge depth of knowledge but instead reward tactics, guesswork, and the ability to handle pressure, naturally the whole philosophy of selection changes. It is no longer the most qualified candidate who advances, but rather the one most skilled at “handling situations.” But we forget the fundamental difference between a good test-taker and a good doctor.
What is the result?
Those who are truly passionate about this profession, those who have studied night after night so that they can ease someone’s suffering in the future, are being left out. On the other hand, those who are choosing this profession solely as a ‘posh vocation,’ for social status, security, or family pressure, are entering a place whose real calculations they have no clue of from the start.
Being a doctor means more than just wearing a white apron.
It means lifelong learning, bearing the weight of decisions, taking ownership of failures, and, most importantly: taking responsibility for human lives.
If this reality is not laid out clearly from the very beginning, naturally the sector will fill with people more concerned with personal benefit than professional responsibility.
This is where the real danger lies.
The health sector doesn’t collapse all at once. It crumbles step by step. First the quality of questions falls, then the quality of selection, then the standard of training, and finally that collapse reaches the highest levels. At that point, you can’t pinpoint one single issue; the whole system becomes questionable.
This is not just a student problem, it is an administrative viewpoint problem.
If the administration still doesn’t realize that the health sector needs a different type of question structure, a different assessment system, and a different mental and ethical filter, then the crisis ahead won’t just be a shortage of doctors—it will be a crisis of trust.
People will stop asking, “Is there a doctor?”
They’ll ask, “Is there a qualified doctor?”
The time to take clear, strict, and farsighted steps is now. The standard of questions needs to return to test depth of knowledge. The reality of the profession must be made clear from the start. And most importantly, the decision of who is needed in this sector must be made not with emotion, but with a sense of responsibility.
Otherwise, one day we will be faced with a health sector full of doctors, but with very little actual care.
Md. Iftekhar Hossain
MBBS 2nd Year, Cox’s Bazar Medical College, Bangladesh | Interests mainly in behavioral science, neuroscience, and habit science.
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