As I mentioned in my previous post, pre-med (and presumably medical students in general) are extremely competitive. It is not only important that they score highly on examinations, but that they wind up at the top of the curve, so that those at the lower ranges are eliminated, even if their exam scores are also very high. In other words, it isn't just enough that a student does as well as he can, but that his fellow students do as poorly as possible.

The driver of this lamentable dynamic is that the number of med school positions is greatly exceeded by the the number of applicants, so all is fair in devising ways of getting your classmates to fail. As I mentioned in my earlier posts, pre-med students were notorious for their willingness to sabotage other's careers to advance theirs, even in my experience, where most of the other students in a physics, chemistry or biology class were not pre-med themselves, but had some totally different major. It was a standing joke in those courses that pre-med students would not just cheat by stealing and copying your lab notes, but then destroy your notes so that your own probability of failure was greatly increased. Typically, the lab work was 25% of your grade, and it was graded at the end of the course, when you turned the notebook in to your professor for checking. No notebook, and you'd have to take that lab over again, regardless of your grades on the lecture quizzes and exams. It brought down your gradepoint average, which I suppose was the whole point.

The really chilling result of this video is not so much that Paul did this to his classmates, but that he would so cavalierly (even proudly) admit it publicly, in front of other medical students, and that their reaction would be so understanding and jovial.