In this era of audit and accountability, there is an imperative to demonstrate and document that appropriate standards have been set in professional education. In medicine, stakeholders want assurance that graduates have attained the required level of competence to be awarded a provisional licence to practise. To investigate the results of a previous study, which revealed that different medical schools set significantly different pass marks for graduating examinations, we examined the descriptors for the minimally competent or "borderline" students which the participants had produced. In this paper we analyse the differences in these descriptors. There was good agreement in the areas of knowledge and clinical skills proficiencies but much less consistency in the use of descriptors covering the themes of communication skills, interpersonal skills and professionalism. It may be that clinicians are not used to thinking about the "borderline" area of clinical competence and have difficulty in translating this nebulous concept into a numerical score.