Medicine: Cutthroat Pre-Meds

Always fierce, competition to get into U.S. medical schools this year has reached unparalleled heights—and depths. The number of would-be physicians has increased enormously over the past decade, but medical school expansion has not kept pace. Some 41,000 applicants are fighting for a scant 14,400 places. At many universities, pre-med students are engaged in a sort of academic guerrilla war to assure not only higher grades for themselves but also lower grades for their competing classmates. The result is an unhealthy atmosphere that could hurt the quality of American medicine.

In the grind...