Expiring Prerequisites/Discrimination Against Older Applicants

[Apollo1]

On 10/14/2020 at 3:04 PM, mitteh71 said:

I disagree. It is usually unreasonable to ask someone to retake a course. I just finished my didactic year. Guess how much organic chemistry I needed to know? Zero. Some schools told me I needed to retake intro to microbiology. I knew more microbiology than every single one of my instructors because I worked in a medical laboratory for years. The concept of expiring courses is a joke. 

Your own personal situation doesn't mirror the majority of applicants to PA school. Many, if not most students aren't working a job where they are directly applying concepts that they were also exposed to in the classroom. Ergo, that knowledge (or even basic recall) is lost over time. If an arbitrary period of time has passed and that matriculating student doesn't have the foundation still with them to some degree, they're potentially being set up for failure.

I agree that certain undergrad courses aren't directly utilized during didactic phase, but other ones are. It's more fair to have the same course repeat requirements than to pick-and-choose which ones don't have to be repeated vs. which ones do.