Pindula encountered a message circulating on WhatsApp that we think might be helpful for some students who have just finished A Level and would like to do medicine at the University of Zimbabwe.
It might also be useful for parents who are helping their children make important career choices.
UZ does not discriminate against schools, especially the faculty of medicine which I have been part of since 2008. It’s unfortunate that many students who do more than 3 subjects at A level end up including irrelevant subjects to our entry requirements.
Our requirements are A level passes in Chemistry and any 2 subjects between Maths, Physics, Biology/Zoology. So besides chemistry, we count the other best 2 subjects, thus we only consider 3 subjects.
So if one does 5 subjects and gets all A’s and a D (2 points) in chemistry, we don’t see it as 22 points but as 12 points because we consider chemistry first and any other best 2 from the above list.
So the message is don’t force your bright students/ children to take up many subjects if they intend to do medicine. This does not increase their chances. Let them concentrate and maximise their efforts on 3 relevant subjects only.
In addition, we don’t count mathematics together with Further Maths or Applied Maths/ Pure Maths…. etc, we just consider Maths as 1 one subject. So it’s of no benefit sitting for exams of all variants of maths.
Our intake is about 300/ yr for medicine. If we have a high number of potential students (which has been the case since 2014) we conduct interviews.
The interview instrument is to weed out potential delinquencies and those who would have been pushed to do medicine by their parents/guardians when they don’t really intend to by themselves.
We also look at communication skills. This is where some students fall off. Some schools concentrate on bookwork but they don’t groom their students