Speaking from personal experience here: when you don’t have good grades in college, this means you haven’t mastered the material, and if you haven’t mastered the material you can’t possibly have a basis with which to learn the far more difficult material offered in med school. You need that basis or you aren’t going to absorb the subject matter that physicians need to know! How people with no background can successfully sit for their exams, I don’t know. It’s very troubling. Do they flunk out, or are they passed along? Do state boards and specialty boards pass them, too?