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Student assessments

It is the end of the morning meeting. Our current pair of medical students from the University of KZN are leaving today and we need to write their assessments. Nomfundo grabs the report sheets from them and peruses the areas we must grade them on.

“I am a very harsh marker,” she declares. “I never give more than 60%.” The students protest loudly.

“But we were there. We worked. You saw us.”

“Yes,” she grins, “but if I grade you well you will be complacent and not work in the future.” The students grumble.

“You are as bad as the Indians in Durban.”

“What do you mean?” I ask. They explain that the medical school in Durban has a largely Indian teaching staff, a heritage of the apartheid era when it was a non-white medical school and there were few black doctors.

“And they are racist when they mark. Like our last assessment. I saw a Zulu patient and got 60% and the Indian student saw the same patient and got 90% and he couldn’t even speak Zulu!”

“And the examiner was Indian?”

“Yes!” One of the CommServ doctors joins our discussion. He studied at UKZN.

“It is true,” he confirms. “Ach – it is terrible.”

“But there must be more black specialists now?” I ask.

“You would think so, but there are not many.”

Later I am speaking with one of the medical consultants at our referral hospital in Ngwelazane who happens to be Zulu. “I do not know where all the black doctors go,” she says. “They are all at medical school and then they disappear. There are very few in specialist training. I think they all go into private practice straight out of their community service. No one wants to train to be a specialist when you can make money as a GP.”

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