Gauging interest in community service: a retrospective review of admission files.

Abstract

By considering applicants’ humanitarian interests, medical schooladmission committees play a crucial role in helping medical schoolsfulfill their social contract with the public—the selection of com-petent and caring future physicians. Validly assessing such diversequalities, however, remains problematic. Admission committees useundergraduate grade-point average and Medical College AdmissionTest scores as markers of intelligence and aptitude. Applicants’ hu-manitarianism or altruism is less amenable to valid measurement.Usually, such characteristics are expressed through the applicant’sself-reported participation in community service activities. Becausedetails regarding these experiences are often sketchy, the scope anddepth of an applicant’s community service experience remain dif-ficult to ascertain and quantify. Admission committees rely on com-munity service experience information in selecting applicants whomay have altruistic inclinations. Little is known about the predic-tive capacity of this non-academic performance variable as it relatesto behavior in medical school, or future medical practice.This study addresses three questions related to the use of appli-cants’ community service experience for selection and predictionpurposes by an admission committee. First, using key medicalschool admission file materials, can reviewers reliably assess appli-cants’ experiences with, and orientation toward, community ser-vice? Second, do reviewers use specific aspects of community serviceto determine their overall assessments of community service in-volvement? Third, can these assessments predict students’ voluntaryparticipation in a new first-year service–learning elective?