If you've watched a student wrap up patient care and immediately ask to leave for another round of test prep questions, you've felt it too. Not disengagement. Just students doing exactly what the system is telling them to do.
In a new blog post, "The Cost of Studying for the Wrong Test," Aquifer Founder and CEO Dr. Leslie Fall traces how a well-intentioned shift, moving Step 1 to pass/fail, quietly reshaped what gets rewarded in clinical training. With fewer quantitative signals available for residency screening, Step 2 and shelf exams absorbed the pressure, and students responded rationally: optimizing for scores over the slower, messier work of building clinical judgment. Dr. Fall makes the case for reclaiming that work, and for making the value of genuine clinical excellence visible enough to compete with test prep culture on its own turf.
Read the full post here: https://aquifer.org/blog/cost-of-studying-for-the-wrong-test
The above ties into the question of what are we actually building in the next generation of clinicians, which carries directly into our podcast series, Clinical Learning Reimagined - the Podcast. In a two-part conversation, Dr. Fall sits down with Dr. Michelle Daniel, Professor of Emergency Medicine and Vice Dean for Medical Education at UC San Diego, to explore how AI is reshaping clinical reasoning development. In Part 1, Dr. Daniel introduces the concept of "never skilling," the risk that learners who outsource reasoning to AI before they've built it themselves may never develop the underlying cognitive structures to know when the tool is wrong. Watch Part 1 here:
In Part 2, the conversation turns practical. Dr. Daniel and Dr. Fall discuss how AI can support overstretched educators, from chart-stimulated recall to question writing, and what medical education might look like if it were rebuilt from the ground up around how expertise actually develops rather than around courses and content blocks. Watch Part 2 here:
Both episodes are also available wherever you get your podcasts.
Come find the blog, the podcast, and more at Clinical Learning, Reimagined.