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A preliminary study of the probitive value of personality assessment in medical school admissions within the United States
BACKGROUND: Allopathic medicine faces a daunting challenge of selecting the best applicants because of the very high applicant / matriculant ratio. The quality of graduates ultimately reflects the quality of medical practice. Alarming recent trends in physician burnout, misconduct and suicide raise...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9783971/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36564835 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03901-x |
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author | Eveland, A. Peter Wilhelm, Sabrina R. Wong, Stephanie Prado, Lissett G. Barsky, Sanford H. |
author_facet | Eveland, A. Peter Wilhelm, Sabrina R. Wong, Stephanie Prado, Lissett G. Barsky, Sanford H. |
author_sort | Eveland, A. Peter |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Allopathic medicine faces a daunting challenge of selecting the best applicants because of the very high applicant / matriculant ratio. The quality of graduates ultimately reflects the quality of medical practice. Alarming recent trends in physician burnout, misconduct and suicide raise questions of whether we are selecting the right candidates. The United States (US) lags far behind the United Kingdom (UK) and Europe in the study of non-cognitive tests in medical school admissions. Although more recently, medical schools in both the UK, Europe and the US have begun to use situational judgement tests such as the Computer-Based Assessment for Sampling Personal Characteristics (CASPer) and the situational judgement test (SJT), recently developed by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and that these tests are, in a sense non-cognitive in nature, direct personality tests per se have not been utilized. We have historically used, in the admissions process within the US, knowledge, reasoning and exam performance, all of which are largely influenced by intelligence and also improved with practice. Personality, though also undoubtedly influenced by intelligence, is fundamentally different and subject to different kinds of measurements. METHODS: A popular personality measurement used over the past two decades within the US in business and industry, but not medical school has been the Neo Personality Inventory – Revised (NEO-PI-R) Test. This test has not been utilized regularly in allopathic medicine probably because of the paucity of exploratory retrospective and validating prospective studies. The hypothesis which we tested was whether NEO-PI-R traits exhibited consistency between two institutions and whether their measurements showed probative value in predicting academic performance. RESULTS: Our retrospective findings indicated both interinstitutional consistencies and both positive and negative predictive values for certain traits whose correlative strengths exceeded traditional premed metrics: medical college admission test (MCAT) scores, grade point average (GPA), etc. for early academic performance. CONCLUSIONS: Our exploratory studies should catalyze larger and more detailed confirmatory studies designed to validate the importance of personality traits not only in predicting early medical school performance but also later performance in one’s overall medical career. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-022-03901-x. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9783971 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-97839712022-12-24 A preliminary study of the probitive value of personality assessment in medical school admissions within the United States Eveland, A. Peter Wilhelm, Sabrina R. Wong, Stephanie Prado, Lissett G. Barsky, Sanford H. BMC Med Educ Research BACKGROUND: Allopathic medicine faces a daunting challenge of selecting the best applicants because of the very high applicant / matriculant ratio. The quality of graduates ultimately reflects the quality of medical practice. Alarming recent trends in physician burnout, misconduct and suicide raise questions of whether we are selecting the right candidates. The United States (US) lags far behind the United Kingdom (UK) and Europe in the study of non-cognitive tests in medical school admissions. Although more recently, medical schools in both the UK, Europe and the US have begun to use situational judgement tests such as the Computer-Based Assessment for Sampling Personal Characteristics (CASPer) and the situational judgement test (SJT), recently developed by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and that these tests are, in a sense non-cognitive in nature, direct personality tests per se have not been utilized. We have historically used, in the admissions process within the US, knowledge, reasoning and exam performance, all of which are largely influenced by intelligence and also improved with practice. Personality, though also undoubtedly influenced by intelligence, is fundamentally different and subject to different kinds of measurements. METHODS: A popular personality measurement used over the past two decades within the US in business and industry, but not medical school has been the Neo Personality Inventory – Revised (NEO-PI-R) Test. This test has not been utilized regularly in allopathic medicine probably because of the paucity of exploratory retrospective and validating prospective studies. The hypothesis which we tested was whether NEO-PI-R traits exhibited consistency between two institutions and whether their measurements showed probative value in predicting academic performance. RESULTS: Our retrospective findings indicated both interinstitutional consistencies and both positive and negative predictive values for certain traits whose correlative strengths exceeded traditional premed metrics: medical college admission test (MCAT) scores, grade point average (GPA), etc. for early academic performance. CONCLUSIONS: Our exploratory studies should catalyze larger and more detailed confirmatory studies designed to validate the importance of personality traits not only in predicting early medical school performance but also later performance in one’s overall medical career. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-022-03901-x. BioMed Central 2022-12-23 /pmc/articles/PMC9783971/ /pubmed/36564835 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03901-x Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Research Eveland, A. Peter Wilhelm, Sabrina R. Wong, Stephanie Prado, Lissett G. Barsky, Sanford H. A preliminary study of the probitive value of personality assessment in medical school admissions within the United States |
title | A preliminary study of the probitive value of personality assessment in medical school admissions within the United States |
title_full | A preliminary study of the probitive value of personality assessment in medical school admissions within the United States |
title_fullStr | A preliminary study of the probitive value of personality assessment in medical school admissions within the United States |
title_full_unstemmed | A preliminary study of the probitive value of personality assessment in medical school admissions within the United States |
title_short | A preliminary study of the probitive value of personality assessment in medical school admissions within the United States |
title_sort | preliminary study of the probitive value of personality assessment in medical school admissions within the united states |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9783971/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36564835 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03901-x |
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