Influence of personality on achievement of medical students.

Abstract

In this study second year medical students completed a battery of psychometric tests which measured both cognitive and non-cognitive personality traits. Personality profiles obtained have been compared with reported norms from some other published sources. The scores obtained from factor analyses of these tests were used as predictors of total achievement in cellular biology and physiology over two years. In agreement with reports by other authors we found that the most important trait contributing to achievement was introversion/extra-version with introversion correlating with high achievement particularly in multiple choice tests. Emotional maturity was also a major factor especially as a predictor of success in essay tests. General mental ability, verbal skills, and reading comprehension appeared as significant predictors of achievement, and these were apparently of comparable importance in both kinds of test. Students of foreign origin whose first language was other than English tended to perform better in essay than multiple choice tests but their overall performance was lower than would have been expected from their other personality traits including their verbal skills. On the other hand, students resident in college halls tended to have better overall performance than expected.