The impact of teaching experience on interview performance of different candidates of basic medical sciences in PhD admission

BACKGROUND: Admission includes written and interview at universities belonging to the ministry of the health and medical education of Iran at PhD level. In the present work, it was tried to find out the likelihood of interview performance of different candidates with their teaching experience in Iranian national medical PhD admission in the year 1386-87. METHODS AND MATERIALS: In this study, applicants’ exam results were extracted from their score workbooks for year 86-87. PhD applicants’ categories were public (ordinary) and employed lecturers. Invited numbers of candidates for interview were 556 from 29 different fields of study. As the number of written subjects were not the same within different fields of study, at the first, each group score distribution were normalized to one and then combined together for final consideration. RESULTS: Accept and reject percentage within public applicants were 45.1 and 54.9, respectively, while the accept percentage within lecturer applicants was 66 and the reject was 34 respectively. Scores of all 29 groups were combined after normalization. The overall performance including test plus interview for public and lecturers were 1.02 ± 0.12 and 0.95 ± 0.1, respectively. The average and standard deviation of test exam of public and lecturer were 1.04 ± 0.16 and 0.91 ± 0.12, respectively. The average and standard deviation of interview exam of public applicants and lecturers applicants were 0.98 ± 0.18 and 1.04 ± 0.17, respectively. CONCLUSION: As results show, the interview performance of lecturers is better than public applicants. Unbalanced acceptance rate amongst lecturers was increased due to the hold of reservation toward interview and due to their higher results gain during interview. If the test performance was a reliable measure for viability of applicant, this reservation would change the acceptance rate close to balance.