Selecting medical students.

Abstract

required skills and personal qualities additional to academic aptitude, and wrote: The leap of logic that equates high marks in an examination at the terminal end of adolescence with a humane and caring medical profession is a nonsense, but is sustained because nobody has any other solution which is strong enough to combat … the “high-enough mark method”. The University of Newcastle led a major change in medical education in Australia in the late 1970s by introducing problembased learning, early clinical skills acquisition, community orientation, and the addition of personal qualities evaluation to the student selection process. The first Newcastle students were admitted in 1978. The Foundation Dean, David Maddison, anticipated the current debate and planned accordingly. The “Newcastle Experiment” 3 involved half the students being admitted on the basis of academic marks alone (top 1%–2%), irrespective of personal qualities assessed by test and interview; the other half were admitted on the basis of personal qualities after applying an academic threshold (top 10%). After a 9-year period, prior academic performance and personal qualities at the time of selection were compared with two outcome measures: a negative measure — non-completion of the course — and a positive one — graduation with honours. The results showed no relationship between either outcome and prior academic performance. However, there were important associations for both the negative and positive outcomes with personal qualities at the time of selection. The interview had the most predictive power in the selection procedure — those who did well in the areas of communication skills, motivation to be a doctor, and capacity to provide support to those in distress had a greater likelihood of completing their studies at medical school and of