Sorry @Bimkom - I hadn't picked up the new thread.
No, I don't think anyone who is significantly involved in medical education would routinely encourage students to aim just to scrape a pass. When we're dealing with students who get very anxious about exams, we will sometimes make the point that they only need to pass, not to excel, but this will be done alongside trying to get them to understand the reason why they're at medical school is to learn how to be doctors, not how to pass exams. There are two things students do that hack us off: (i) repeatedly asking "will this be in the exam?" when we try to get them to learn fundamental principles in years 1-3; (ii) skipping clinical placements to spend time doing practice exam questions in years 3-5. No matter how many times we tell them they will learn medicine from patients, not from books/flashcards/question banks, they can't get away from the fear that if they don't do the practice questions they will fail the exams and never get a chance to treat patients.
It's clear there's a major problem with how we assess medical students if they don't believe that actually learning medicine will enable them to pass exams. I can't help feeling the Medical Licensing Assessments (MLA) will make this even worse.
But the key point is that some students who become obsessive about maximising their exam marks are not going to be better doctors as a result, while those who spend as much time as possible on wards, in clinics, etc., almost certainly will be better doctors but won't necessarily have the greatest exam marks. I can think of two of our current final-year students who I know will both make brilliant doctors. One of them will undoubtedly be in the top 10 in the year in terms of exam results; the other will equally certainly be in the bottom half. They will probably follow different career paths but they will both be excellent at what they do, because that's the kind of people they are.
Numbers are always troublesome; not least for medical students, whose general standard of numeracy is shocking. When you say to a member of the public that a medical student can pass their exams with marks of just above 50% they would tend to think this means they only know half of medicine. First, pass marks would only ever be that low in the first couple of years (except in medical schools that use progress testing, where it would be fairly normal to have marks around 50% or lower in year 3 but final-year pass marks are likely to be around 70%). Secondly, there isn't a fixed body of knowledge that they "only" know 50% of: you would have to be a genius to know even 5% of all medical knowledge. It's that they answered just over 50% of questions correctly but some of those are questions we would only expect 30% of students at the next level up to be able to answer. Again, pass marks in final exams are much more likely to be in the upper sixties. Most questions are about common conditions, so everyone should know something about them, but they might be complicated presentations or management plans that have to take into account co-morbidities, allergies, drug interactions, etc. Of course, there are still questions about very rare conditions that are favourites of textbook writers and question-writers (because they are easy to write and only have one possible correct answer). A fifth-year student told me one of their exams had included multiple questions about a condition that is in every textbook but hardly ever seen in practice. This is one of the things that encourages them to do practice questions instead of seeing patients. Someone really needs to go through the question databases and cull a large proportion of the questions about these rare conditions.