Should students who want to attend medical school have to slog through a year of physics, memorize the structures of dozens of cellular chemicals or spend months studying for the MCAT? Not necessarily.

There are a few nontraditional paths into medical school. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, for example, has admitted a quarter of its incoming students for the last 25 years through a program that gave early admittance to humanities students who didn't have to take the full premed slate of science classes.

"It was designed to attract humanities majors to medicine who would bring a different perspective to education and medical practice," says Dr. Dennis Charney, dean of the school. And it worked so well, he says, that the school expanded the program on Wednesday. By 2015, about half the incoming class will be admitted through the new FlexMed program, which will accept students of any educational background, including those in computer science and engineering.

"We're really looking for students that are innovative, that think out of the box," Charney says, "the [Mark] Zuckerbergs of the world that would go into medicine instead of [creating] Facebook."

Prospective students won't have to take the MCAT. But the program doesn't eliminate science entirely. Students, who will be admitted during their sophomore year, will have to take a year of biology or chemistry before applying, and then a few more science and math classes before graduation, as well as maintain a 3.5 GPA. And students who didn't take enough advanced science as undergraduates will have to go to summer school to learn cell biology, biochemistry and genetics.

Charney says the students will be tracked through medical school and their careers to see if there are differences in the types of fields they go into, the research they perform or the leadership positions they attain.

"If we show that we attract a really innovative group of students," he says, "then I think [other medical schools] will follow our lead."

The traditional med school requirements have been in place for a century, but even when they were first instituted some objected, saying they excluded many excellent potential recruits to the medical profession.

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The exam all medical school applicants take will have new sections requiring a broader knowledge of psychology, sociology, and the social components of health starting in 2015.

Patients tend to have great confidence in the scientific knowledge in their doctors, but less confidence in their bedside manners, said Dr. Darrell Kirch, president and CEO of the American Association of Medical Colleges.

The exam is “designed to help students prepare for a rapidly changing health care system and an evolving body of medical knowledge while addressing the needs of a growing, aging, and increasingly diverse population,” according to a press release from the AAMC, which represents all 136 accredited U.S. medical schools.

The exam is "a key tool that we have used and will continue to use to select the people who will be our doctors in the future," Kirsch said. "This is an important component in the gateway to the profession of medicine."

The MCATs will now take six and a half hours (instead of the current four and a half hours), with a total of four sections.

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