Thousands of final year medical students have been left in the dark after their first hospital job offers were withdrawn because of "scoring errors" in a critical final year exam. A day after 7,200 students were, in effect, given their initial jobs as junior doctors, the examining body was forced to contact them – nearly every student in that year – to rescind the offers because of apparent marking mistakes. The position of hundreds of these students could now change, leaving almost the entire batch of medical students with an anxious week before the examining body goes through all the papers again. Students contacted the Guardian to express alarm that with just two weeks before their final written exams take place many were in limbo – unsure in which city they would be living from the summer. One final year student in Wales summed up the mood saying: "I had many hours of lost sleep and anxiety waiting for the announcement on Monday and then found out I had been placed in my first choice location only to be told 36 hours later that that may not be the case … Revising for finals is stressful enough without any added misery!" There is speculation that the errors were caused by ink-stained photocopied sheets that could not be read by the automated marking system. The examining body, the UK Foundation Programme Office (UKFPO), says it will resort to manual marking of an estimated 1,200 papers and clear the backlog within seven days. There is some concern that hospitals will need to provide extra cover in the summer if medical students they thought would arrive are instead sent elsewhere. New medical graduates could miss the August start date as they wait for criminal record and other employer checks that cannot be carried out until a final-year student has been placed. These checks can take up to eight weeks. Unions representing doctors said "mistakes needed to be corrected urgently". The co-chairs of the BMA medical students committee, Alice Rutter and Will Seligman, and the chair of the BMA junior doctors committee, Ben Molyneux, said they would express their anger at the "unacceptable situation" in a joint letter to UKFPO. Rutter said: "Students who initially will have been delighted to receive their foundation school allocation may now be concerned that their job could be at risk. This is completely unacceptable. We view this problem very seriously indeed and will be taking action to ensure students who are affected are kept updated and supported." The Department of Health said that this error "should not have happened" and said that the examining body was "working urgently to resolve this". The BMA said it expected to be kept fully informed of what steps the UKFPO and the Medical Schools Council, which discovered the error, were taking. The union said there were already concerns with the system as almost 300 medical students had been placed on a reserve list "because of a third year of oversubscription". Critics say that medics failed to get jobs because of NHS cuts. The examining body has admitted it has had problems with the "computerised scoring of the new SJT (situational judgment test)". The test, a multiple-choice exam, is a key factor in getting a good first job – the higher the score, the more chance medical students have of securing their first-choice foundation school. In fact the test was only introduced this year with students sitting the exam in December and January - and represents say students 50% of the marks required for the their first job. The SJT was dubbed a "personality rest" which required candidates to read through clinical scenarios and rank a set of given actions in order of preference. The BMA has called for a telephone helpline for affected students, and for a clear timetable for new offers to be made, supported by regular emails and updates on the UKFPO website. The UKFPO, which only this week in the British Medical Journal had proclaimed its new test "a success", attempted to temper criticism with a promise that it would fix the error quickly. Case studies Lyndon James, a final-year medical student at UCL, described it as "an appalling affair". He wrote: "Along with many of my colleagues, I simply cannot understand why this wasn't discovered in the six weeks between the exam date and the release of results. What's worse, the email we received informing us of the debacle did not even contain an apology. "It's an eagerly awaited result because it gives us the rough geographical area we will be working in for the next two years. This is a huge consideration for important life decisions. I know of people whose partners were putting in offers for properties on the day of the results, and I have even heard that some partners of our prospective junior doctors were planning to quit their jobs to move to where the applicants had been placed. With so many knock-on effects, this really is a shambles. Why, oh why wasn't it dealt with weeks ago?!" Chris, a final-year medical student in Sheffield, said: " I don't think they realise the rebound effect this error will have – people have bought train tickets for welcome days, people's partners have accepted jobs or further training places as a result of this decision." Matthew, a former student at Newcastle university, said: "Having been separated by 350 miles a year ago due to a similarly farcical situation, my girlfriend and I were overjoyed on Monday that we would finally be living together again as she received confirmation that she would be working in London. A day later, and we're back in emotional limbo. Medical students are treated as anonymous cogs in an uncaring machine. Absolutely disgusting." A student in Hull said: "The additional failings of this week reinforce the widely-held opinion that the system is still unfair and does not judge students on merit. It seems like the UKFPO have been unwilling to carry out the necessary checks, for reasons they are yet to provide. "The latest letter released by the BMA indicates that these issues were known about as early as last week, yet they still ran the allocation algorithm and allowed students to begin making financial commitments on the basis of these allocations, before taking FPAS offline. I had ranked all of my jobs on the first day. This takes a considerable amount of time if you have to rank every job from 1-500+ in order of preference and is not ideal when we are supposed to be revising for exams. This is particularly the case when some students will change areas as a result of any re-run decision." Another student said: "The UKFPO has been to the medical schools and asked if they can return all students SJTs back to their unis for them to manually remark them. Being such a huge task and with many of them running finals exams, most medical schools have refused. This now means that the UKFPO is unlikely to even make the second deadline it gave us. The number of affected papers is believed to be around 1250, or 1 in 6, leaked by various foundation programme staff around the country." In Warwick, one student said: "I was really happy to get my first choice on Monday. It meant my partner could hand in his notice and accept a job offer he had already been given in the area, which he did on Tuesday morning. Now we don't know where in the country we will end up, or if he will have to ask for his job back after handing in his notice!! I'm mostly angry about the way they have handled it; mistakes happen but telling us at 6pm by email without telling our medical schools what was going on is unacceptable." Source
