Around two-thirds of any national budget (which President Javier Milei’s government has yet to present, it might be said in passing) is historically absorbed by the famous trinity of health, education and welfare – in responding to the scandal of medical resident exams by delegating these to the provinces, the government is yet again following in the footsteps of the Carlos Menem Presidency, which decentralised education and health to the provinces in order to ease the fiscal strain on convertibility with generally adverse consequences.
Cheating in exams is as old as the hills with artificial intelligence adding a whole new dimension today in every profession but the recent scandal is also symptomatic of underlying problems. Dismantling the federal Examen Único for medical residents because of the fraud is a further example of this government throwing out the baby with the bathwater – a central part of the university problem is precisely the lack of such exams for admission to higher education, lowering its standards while remaining a luxury for bright working-class kids. The Examen Único was introduced in 2011 at the request of Patagonian and inland provinces lacking universities to train and filter their doctors but instead of multiplying such exams to ensure the proper training of those entrusted with the nation’s health, there has been an explosion of universities since, only compounding their overpopulation – faculties with space and staff for hundreds of students receive thousands every year with hundreds of students per lecturer instead of a few dozen as in universities elsewhere.
While all fraud should be unveiled, it is hard not to see a certain xenophobia underlying the exposure of this scandal since its catalyst was a student from Ecuador using smart glasses to copy and obtain a mark of 92 percent, 30 percent above his real level. This lends ammunition to a government drive to charge fees on foreign students, who account for almost 30 percent of those taking medical resident exams. Not unreasonable as such but it may also be asked if so many foreigners come to Argentina because they see it as a soft touch in academic as well as economic terms with its free admission, for which fees would not be a complete solution? Just as the government has held last month’s inflation below two percent for the third time running, despite a 13 percent surge of the dollar thanks in part to imports as well as consumer exhaustion, so it can hold down medical salaries by importing doctors but the meagre earnings of the profession are leading to a crisis in the health system.
That crisis of spiralling costs eating away at the salaries of health professionals is also hitting the training of doctors, conspiring against the renewal of faculties despite the thousands of university graduates. The strong reaction of a government with possible ulterior motives contrasts with the indifference of the universities and the silence of professional associations and hospital chambers thus far in the face of this scandal.
Yet are universities wholly to blame for educational and cultural deficits long preceding entry into institutions of higher learning? The whole scandal needs to be placed in a much broader context. Perhaps the real scandal is not the Examen Único now falling into discredit but the absence of similar demanding exams requiring special training and academic standards while establishing an order of merit and culminating in the right number for the residencies available, not the extreme multiplication within a higher learning spearheaded by UBA Buenos Aires University with over 350,000 students. The sheer scale works against controls to prevent academic fraud with modern technology compounding the techniques far beyond the eternal copying in exams.
In the month when the lists and candidates for the upcoming midterms are being finalised, it might also be asked how many parties (including and perhaps especially the ruling La Libertad Avanza) have applied rigorous criteria of track record and merit instead of contacts and subservience when choosing the future representatives of the people? This scandal of cheating in medical resident exams should not be seen as restricted to one profession but calling for a much wider debate which is unlikely to appear in a midterm campaign where the government is holding structural reforms of all kinds hostage to being granted a Congress majority (or at least enough seats to protect presidential vetoes from being overridden). “Cheats never prosper,” it is often said and we can only hope that one day this might actually be true.
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