Low Pass: affirmative action at its worst!

When I moved back to California in 1973, after 7 awful years in Minnesota (the weather not the people), I was on the Urology faculty in the Surgery Department at the University of California Davis. As a member of the surgery department, I participated in the oral examinations given to UCD’s third year medical students after they completed their surgery rotation.
To put what I am going to relate to you in perspective, before the days of affirmative action the weeding out of people who wanted to become doctors, but were not qualified, occurred before they got into medical school. In other words, it was tough to get in, but once in you were almost sure to graduate and to pass the licensure examinations thereafter. This is not to say that the training and testing of medical students was anything but rigorous, to say the least. It was just that if you could get into medical school, you were able to handle most anything that the faculty could throw at you.
This, as you may know, is the opposite of what happens in Law schools where almost anyone who can come up with the tuition can get into some school and the weeding out process occurs during the first year and later at the bar examinations.
Anyway, getting back to the story that I am about to relate, there were around 15 pairs of professors who were charged with examining the third year medical students at UCD; in my case, I was paired with a general surgeon, and we gave oral exams to about 6 to 8 individual students who had completed the surgery rotation. Each examination lasted about 15 minutes and each student was examined by 4 different pairs of examiners. Each of the students also had completed a multiple choice type of written test, although we did not know, by design, until later how they had faired on that part of the examination.
To make a long story short, all of the students that my partner and I quizzed did reasonably well and we were not able to stump several of the students no matter how difficult we made the questions. That is all but one, a black female who didn’t seem to have a clue about anything. I recall specifically that she had no idea as to the significance of red blood cells urine and was clueless with respect to the difference between a direct and indirect inguinal hernia.
We, of course, had no option but to flunk her. When the oral examinations were concluded and we all convened to determine the grades the students would receive, the other three pairs of faculty members who had examined this black female also came to the same conclusion. One examiner commented that he couldn’t believe that she had actually taken the surgery course, seemed impossible were his exact words. Considering her lack of knowledge, it was no great surprise to learn that she had also failed the written examination.
When it came time for the final vote, every single one of the 30 or so examiners, with little discussion, voted to flunk her. As it turned out, this was her second try at passing the surgery course. She had flunked the first time around and flunking again meant that she was out of medical school which should have been a blessing for everyone concerned.
What happened next took me completely by surprise. Understand that we did not have affirmative action in the University of Minnesota at that time and I, as a new member of the faculty, was nearly clueless with respect to the way things were done at UCD. In any case, the chief of surgery, Earl Wolfman (may he roast in the hottest part of hell), who had not said a word during the grading session up to that point, said the two magic words that floored me, might as well have been hit me between the eyes with a pole ax. Anyway, Dr Wolfman cleared his throat and said the two magic words that all low achievers want to hear, low pass! At that point my friends, I knew that medicine as I knew it was a thing of the past.