12 year old kid starts medical school

Cnn.com ^ | Aug 25, 2003 | CNN special report

[Steve_Seattle]

I wonder if this kid really wants to be a doctor, or if he's just expected to be one because he's smart.

[TheOtherOne]

LOL...you get a gold star for courage! Admitting a lil kid beat ya on the SAT! :-)

Actually, he said he beat the kid. How did you do on the reading comprehension?

[CanadianLibertarian]

ooopsie.....shoulda actually read the post...sorry..i was skimming.

i dunno...my verbal SAT was 790...so not too bad at reading comprehension i suppose. usually. when i actually read the words instead of skimming.

[TheOtherOne]

: )

[Young Werther]

For under 21 year old doctors there's always training wheels.

[MonroeDNA]

Hey, can you freepmail me on any info you have on the neuro thing? You have Freepmail.

My SAT's got me into Mensa, which I joined as a joke--just to show my friends the card, some 20 years ago. The night before, my buddies and I smoked dope and drank until 3 am.

(stopped that long ago, after I saw what it did to people long term)

For those that don't know, IQ is a Bell curve, with the average defined as 100. 132 (depending on the test) is roughly 3 standard deviations, which means (as I recall) 97.3%(?) of people fall below it. It is the cutoff for Mensa. Really high IQ's are very difficult to measure. 200 is over 9 standard deviations. Without my stats book & tables, I am not sure, but 6 standard deviations (six sigma) is, I believe, 3 in a million. 9 has to be close to 1 in a billion.

(Also, FYI, the SAT used to be acceptable as an IQ indicator, but a few years ago, when the average fell well below 1000, they made the test easier, so that everyone scored an average of 100 points higher. Today's 1200 SAT score would have been 1100 a few years ago)

BTW, yes my verbal was lower than my math--lol! Partially dyslexic, slightly autistic, beer swizzling, gun-owning, dog loving, union hating, free-market capitalist.

[MonroeDNA]

They have special tests for very high IQ people. In most standard IQ tests, if you even get one answer wrong, you can't score more than around 145. When you make the test harder, you can differentiate high IQ's.

The best I've seen is the Mobious Test; I don't know if it is still around. Taken by mail. No time limit. Maybe 20 questions. Take a year if you want. It is that hard. Of course you are on your honor--lol! But at that level, who wants to cheat, anyway? I took two weeks, got maybe half right, and they said 156. I think it is good to the upper 180's or so.

[ChemistCat]

I've had many an older doctor who was absolutely horrible in every way: bad judgement, bad bedside manner, bad office hiring decisions, and totally wrong diagnoses.

I don't know how a bright kid who wants to help people could do worse than some of these selfish, soured, lazy old guys who probably take more drugs than they prescribe--and that's saying something.

[squidly]

Kind of a shame he'll never really get to be a kid/young person like most of the rest of us, but maybe he could never be like the rest of us anyway.

[muir_redwoods]

Just compare young drivers to drivers in their '30's. He might be fine but I'm betting on age and experience, just in the mature judgement department alone.

[mtbopfuyn]

With a Mensa cut off of only 132 I could have gotten in but what's the point? I had my BS by 19 but now have no desire to use my degrees. I hadn't had time to experience life enough to make such major decisions and 12 yo Sho certainly hasn't. Sure, he may ace written tests but how does a kid explain to a husband his wife is dying from breast cancer? What parent would allow a teen to remove a brain tumor on their child? Give the kid a skateboard and let him take a few basics but wait on med school until he's older.