I hear that in the UK you can go into medical school as soon as you get out of high school. SO i was wondering if this was true and also how much would it cost to do this?? And also if you become a doctor in the UK would it be possible to come back to America and use your degree here?
Higher Education (University +) - 2 Answers
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1 :
You can go straight to Med school in the UK, but you would need about six incredible A-levels as a British student. These are intensive and very challenging exams top students take at the end of high school. Or, you could take the American equivalent, about 10 - 12 APs with grades of 5 on all of them, usually in: - Physics B - Physics C - BC Calc - Stat - Chemistry - Biology - Foreign Language - EnvSci - English - Psych - Latin All these along with nearly perfect SAT II scores in these same subjects. A regular American high school education will NOT by any means cut it. Tuition is similar to American med schools - about 45,000 dollars a year. You can certainly use a British medical degree in the States. Best of luck =]
2 :
The first response is mostly correct, but to clarify, A Levels are courses, not just exams. And it is accurate to state that a US high school diploma is not going to meet the admission requirements to a UK medical school. Equally important, UK medical schools rarely accept US students for the simple fact that US students leave the UK to go back to the US. Nobody can practice medicine in the US until they have successfully passed the US Medical Licensing Exam. The USMLE Step 1 exam is entirely focused on the Basic Sciences, which are emphasized in US medical schools far more than anywhere else, so anybody not educated in a US medical school is at a disadvantage. For this reason, many foreign trained physicians cannot practice in the US or they must take additional classes in the Basic Sciences. If you think students in the UK get to practice medicine sooner than their US counterparts, you are mistaken. Although most of the world enrolls students into medical schools straight out of high school, the medical schools and residency training are longer. In other words, it still about 11 years to become an independent practitioner. There aren't any short cuts to becoming a physician.
