Relationship Between Student Personality Characteristics and Performance on the ASCP BOR Examination

Abstract

The decreased applicant pool caused one hospital program admission committee to wonder if there were student characteristics, other than grade point average (GPA), that could provide some insight into an applicant’s chance of academic success in the medical technology (MT) program. Several students with borderline GPAs seemed to be excellent candidates except they failed to meet the science GPA cutoff criteria of 2.5 on a 4.0 scale. The hospital program studied the usefulness of their MT program’s preclinical faculty recommendation form. The common rating form contained 10 student characteristics that were judged by preclinical faculty. The students in the study population were from five different academic affiliates of the hospitalbased program. School records of 31 students, over a 5-year period, were studied. Results showed that a combination of three student characteristics—initiative/originality, comprehension, and judgment—appeared to correlate highly with success on the American Society of Clinical Pathologists Board of Registry examination.