Medical watchdog Do No Harm released a report Tuesday that it says shows how the quality of medical students’ reports has deteriorated, becoming more “weak” and more “woke” since letter grades were terminated.
Director of research at Do No Harm Dr. Jay Greene told The Center Square: “Without the use of the letter-grade system, students are searching for other ways to stand out for fellowships and residency programs.”
This has “inevitably led to an arms race in publications authored by medical students,” Greene said.
“To compound the problem, quantity is incentivized over quality – leading to shoddy research and focus on politicized topics,” Greene said.
Greene said that Do No Harm’s report “reveals the many factors responsible for the degradation of the research enterprise and offers proposed solutions to correct course.”
“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.
In a news release, Do No Harm stated that “low-quality medical student–authored research has increased over the last two decades, corresponding with medical schools’ elimination of letter grades.”
According to Do No Harm’s report, “medical student–authored research was uncommon 25 years ago” with no more than 17 publications per year being written by a student author from 2000 to 2006.
A slight increase was seen from 2007 to 2012, with the number of studies from medical student authors fluctuating between 17 and 58, the report said.
By 2013, “student authorship rose to 135 publications,” the report said, and the next year the number “jumped again” to 411.
“By 2022, that number rose to 932 before slipping back to 735 in 2025,” the report said.
Do No Harm’s report said that the 2025 decline “may be distorted by the fact that PubMed is sometimes delayed in receiving and listing publications, sometimes by several years.”
PubMed is the resource Do No Harm used to scan biomedical literature for its report.
Do No Harm’s report also noted the rise in “politicized” or “woke” research from these medical students.
“Between 2000 and 2013, only 26 out of the 408 articles (six percent) published by medical students contained” at least one “woke term” such as ““equity,” “disparities,” “social,” “justice,” “race,” “racist,” “racism,” “diversity,” or “inclusion,” the report said.
Between 2021 and 2025, this jumped to 21%, with “a fifth…of medical-student publications [having] at least one woke term in their title or abstract,” the report said.
Do No Harm concluded that “the quality of medical-student publications is actually declining as the volume is increasing.”
One solution Do No Harm’s report gave to the issue of medical student publications is reversing the shift that was made to pass/fail grading.
Two other solutions include “capping the number of publications students can list on residency applications” or “encouraging residency-program directors to pay more attention to the quality of publications.”
