Most medical schools attempt to select applicants on the basis of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Typically, interpersonal skills are assessed by interview, though relatively few applicants make it to interview. Thus, an efficient paper and pencil test of non-cognitive skills is needed. One possibility is personality tests. Tests of the five…

Admissions committees and researchers around the globe have used diligence and imagination to develop and implement various screening measures with the ultimate goal of predicting future clinical and professional performance. What works for predicting future job performance in the human resources world and in most of the academic world may not,…

A major expense for most professional training programs, both financially and in terms of human resources, is the interview process used to make admissions decisions. Still, most programs view this as a necessary cost given that the personal interview provides an opportunity to recruit potential candidates, showing them what the program has to…

Purpose: Self-declaration of personal values has been suggested as a means of identifying students with greater predilection for future primary care careers. While statistically significant differences have been demonstrated, absolute differences between those interested in primary care and those interested in specialist careers tend to be small.…

A consistent finding from many reviews is that undergraduate Grade Point Average (uGPA) is a key predictor of academic success in medical school. Curiously, while uGPA has established predictive validity, little is known about its reliability. For a variety of reasons, medical schools use different weighting schemas to combine years of study.…

Despite the critical importance of maintaining a valid and transparent selection process that serves the values held by all stakeholders involved in medical education (i.e., students, faculty, society), there continue to be problems with the current state of available admissions protocols. Some problems derive from inertia induced by inaccurate…

Context: Various research studies have examined the question of whether expert or non-expert raters, faculty or students, evaluators or standardized patients, give more reliable and valid summative assessments of performance on Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs). Less studied has been the question of whether or not non-faculty…

As the rapidity with which medical knowledge is generated and disseminated becomes amplified, an increasing emphasis has been placed on the need for physicians to develop the skills necessary for life-long learning. One such skill is the ability to evaluate one's own deficiencies. A ubiquitous finding in the study of self-assessment, however, is…