Science fiction film/tv movie – medical student forms friendship with research robot

I think I saw this on television in the early 80s.

A medical student is performing a procedure and the patient tells her information about what is happening with his body as she does it. He “dies” and is revealed to be a kind of half-living medical robots. She is working on a new technique and keeps failing at it.

She goes to take out a new robot for the next attempt and finds it is self aware. It has a personality, which is normally wiped after a surgery. I think he says he bribed a maintenance worker to not wipe him and to let him listen to music while he’s waiting between procedures. He tells her he doesn’t want her to put him through a surgery because he doesn’t want to die.

She tells him he should be proud to sacrifice himself for the common good, and he opens his shirt to show all the scars he had from previous surgeries (naming them all). At one point, he tries to escape, but he can’t walk so she finds him crawling on the ground.

The day of the surgery comes, and it goes badly. She ignores his advice on what to do because it will end up causing him permanent injury even if he lives. She manages to save him and suddenly he dies.

She is devastated, but the teachers tell her the entire thing was a ruse. They set it all up to make her care enough about the robot to try harder (or something). Later we see her putting headphones on the robot while he is in his little hibernation coffin.

For some reason, I think James Earl Jones played the lead teacher, but it’s not on his IMDB, so it could have just been my faulty memory.

Thanks, if anyone knows it’s been bugging me forever.