The white competition for future doctors turns into a fiasco

"A fiasco!" “ Sarah Daubresse, vice-president of the ANEMF, the association which represents the medical students, does not take off after the mock exam which turned into a nightmare for the future doctors

The white competition for future doctors turns into a fiasco

"A fiasco!" “ Sarah Daubresse, vice-president of the ANEMF, the association which represents the medical students, does not take off after the mock exam which turned into a nightmare for the future doctors. From this Monday, March 13 to Wednesday, 15, all sixth-year students, who must pass the national ranking tests (ECN) at the end of the year and choose their boarding school - and therefore their future specialization -, had to take simultaneous training on the computer platform used for the competition. Except that nothing happened as planned, due to serial breakdowns.

Added to the stress of preparing for these difficult and career-determining exams, this giant breakdown is especially worrying because it is the same platform that will be used in June for the final competition. “It's very anxiety-provoking for the students, thunders Sarah Daubresse. At three months of the tests, they are told that it does not work! »

In recent years, however, the tool has worked smoothly. So what happened? It is the National Management Center (CNG), under the supervision of the Ministry of Health, which manages the examination platform. This year, the ECN events having evolved, it had to be adapted. A work carried out since the end of 2021, assures Point Philippe Touzy, head of the exercise authorization department, competition and coaching at the CNG. But, by touching "the heart of the reactor", it destabilized the platform.

The CNG, which "obviously regrets" these incidents, indicates that, while only 85% of students were able to complete the exam on Monday, the rate rose to 97% on Tuesday morning and 99% on Tuesday afternoon, where the event was the only one identical to previous years. "It's not a fiasco. Even if the conditions were not optimal, with slowdowns, many students were able to finish. Philippe Touzy assures that "the main reasons for the anomalies have been identified, and that it is likely that a new test will be carried out over one day by the June ECNs". Some universities have referred to the "end of April-beginning of May" deadline.

"Students who have been able to complete the tests will have their grades," confirms the CNG, but there will indeed be no national ranking. The administration also assures that there was never any question of white competition, but of "test" competition. Clearly, the national training tests usually organized by universities, on a different platform from that of the final competition, have been replaced by a technical test of the CNG platform to verify the changes made to the system. But this was never made clear to the students.

“The worst thing, Marine gets annoyed, is that on Monday morning, we were brought in for a load test of the platform… But we were just asked to log in, without doing a test question! Philippe Touzy confirms. Nothing out of the ordinary, he said. “The purpose of the load test is to see what happens after everyone is connected. But we don't upload photos, we don't send answers like during a test, so the servers aren't as busy. And to promise that his teams are working hard to fix the problem. The students, they just have to cross their fingers that everything goes well in June.

*Name has been changed.