Clinical assessment performance of graduate- and undergraduate-entry medical students
Katharine J Reid1, Agnes E Dodds, Geoffrey J McColl
1Medical Education Unit, Melbourne Medical School, The University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia. kjreid@unimelb.edu.au
Background:
Recent evidence suggests that graduate-entry medical students may have a marginal academic performance advantage over undergraduate entrants in a pre-clinical curriculum in both bioscience knowledge and clinical skills assessments. It is unclear whether this advantage is maintained in the clinical phase of medical training.
Aim:
The study aimed to compare graduate and undergraduate entrants undertaking an identical clinical curriculum on assessments undertaken during clinical training in the medical course.
Methods:
Clinical assessment results for four cohorts of medical students (n = 713) were compared at the beginning and at the end of clinical training for graduate and undergraduate entrants.
Results:
Results showed that graduate- and undergraduate-entry medical students performed similarly on clinical assessments. Female students performed consistently better than male students.
Conclusion:
The findings of this study suggest that any academic performance advantage held by graduate-entry medical students is limited to the early years of the medical course, and is not evident during clinical training in the later years of the course.
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