Abstract
ABSTRACTBackground: Assessment of an individual medical school’s performance in the match is an important outcome of the educational program. Unfortunately, student rank lists are not public. A method to objectively gauge the quality of an institution’s match regardless of student preference has not been described in the literature.Objective: This manuscript serves to determine the relative weights of included variables and derive a statistically valid Match Quality Score (MQS).Design: Between 2016 and 2018, student affairs experts derived from a national cohort validated the MQS by scoring factitious mini-match lists that covered three variables: student’s Match Status, specialty Competitiveness, and residency program Reputation.Results: Of the variables assessed, only Match Status and Competitiveness were found to be significant. We derived the resulting coefficients for the Match Quality Score (MQS) as: [3.74A (# students successfully matched) + 2.34B (# students matching into their initial specialty in the SOAP process) + 1.77C (# students who secured a SOAP position in another specialty) + 0.26D (# students matching into a specialty where there are more applicants than spots)]/Total # students.Conclusions: The MQS is a potentially useful educational outcome measurement for US medical schools and may be considered as an outcome measure for continuous quality improvement to tailor future institutional changes to training, mentoring, and student-advising programs.
Highlights
Assessment of an individual medical school’s performance in the match is an important outcome of the educational program
We created 24 factitious mini-match lists composed of 10 factitious students, each covering the range of three independent variables: Matching Status, Competitiveness, and Reputation
Results from the analysis of variance (ANOVA) analysis indicated that the main effects of Matching Status (F(3,78) = 113.05, MSerror = 2.28, p < 0.001) and Competitiveness (F(2, 52) = 9.66, MSerror = 0.37, p < 0.001) were both significant, while the main effect of Reputation (F(1, 26) = 0.713, MSerror = 0.42, p = 0.41) was not
Summary
Assessment of an individual medical school’s performance in the match is an important outcome of the educational program. An earlier study sought to assess the quality of match success by surveying program directors at the home intuition and was able to provide a subjective description their students’ placement at various residency locations [8]. Such a study is subjective and less useful for continuous quality improvement. To truly improve the quality of a medical school’s match outcomes, a quantitative method should be developed to ‘score’ the matches from year to year With such a scoring process, schools could compare annual match performance to assess the impact of changes in curriculum or advising
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