The ‘Arms Race’ Making America’s Future Doctors Dumber

A troubling trend is emerging as medical schools place higher value on producing politicized research over academic excellence, a watchdog report found. 

Do No Harm, an organization focused on getting politics out of medicine, discovered that as medical school students have produced more research, they have increasingly focused on leftist-driven research at the same time. This occurred as schools moved away from the traditional letter grade system to pass/fail standards, according to a study from Do No Harm first obtained by The Daily Wire. 

Jay Greene, the director of research at Do No Harm, told The Daily Wire the shift away from traditional grading as institutions placed higher emphasis on research production triggered an “arms race” that has significantly lowered the quality of the nation’s future doctors. 

“Without the use of the letter-grade system, students are searching for other ways to stand out for fellowships and residency programs, which has inevitably led to an arms race in publications authored by medical students,” Greene told The Daily Wire. 

Greene found in his study that fewer than a dozen student-authored or co-authored papers were published per year in the early 2000s, but grew to over 700 per year by the 2020s. 

“The increase in medical-student research was driven in large part by their desire to pad résumés and compete for residency positions as other signals of quality,” the study found. 

Do No Harm.

Greene noted that most medical students are not trained in scientific research techniques. 

“Medical students are generally very smart and motivated, but they are no better able to conduct scientific research without adequate preparation than they would be to conduct open-heart surgery without formal training,” the study found. 

While production has increased, quality has not kept up as more research has focused on political topics emphasizing racial or sexual identity. 

“To compound the problem, quantity is incentivized over quality — leading to shoddy research and focus on politicized topics,” Greene told The Daily Wire. 

Greene measured this by analyzing publications by student-authors cataloged in PubMed that had descriptions featuring terms like “equity,” “disparities,” “social,” “justice,” “diversity,” or “racism,” among others. He found that just 6% of publications between 2000 and 2013 fell into the woke category before the number ballooned to 11% in 2014 to 2020 and 21% between 2021 and 2025. 

Do No Harm.

Greene examined competing academic studies on student research output. One study from the Wayne State University School of Medicine argued that research quality had improved while a study published in the Researchers’ Journal of Internal Medicine demonstrated that quality had not improved as production increased. 

Do No Harm argued that the problem could be addressed by returning to letter grading and capping the number of student publications medical school students can list on applications to residency placement. 

“By returning to objective letter grading, schools would incentivize students to focus on mastering their skill set in the clinical space rather than fluffing their résumés with baseless research endeavors,” Greene said.