Related Experiment Video
Updated: Feb 4, 2026

Medical-grade Sterilizable Target for Fluid-immersed Fetoscope Optical Distortion Calibration
Published on: February 23, 2017
Variation of surgery clerkship grades in US medical schools
Michelle R Brownstein1, Mary R Shen2, Paula D Strassle1
1Department of Surgery, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 4008 Burnett-Womack Building, CB #7228, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-7050, USA.
Background:
Despite efforts at standardization, evaluation and reporting of clerkships remains highly variable. This study reviews the current spectrum of surgical clerkship grading.
Methods:
Data were reviewed for every medical school from which an application was received to a single surgery residency program in 2017 and were evaluated for core surgical clerkship grading systems, distributions, and components. Fischer's exact tests and Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests were used for analysis.
Results:
133 (49 private) schools were evaluated. Geographic distribution:34 Northeast, 50 South, 31 Midwest and 18 West. 120 reported grading tiers, with public schools (95%) more likely than private (80%) to report this (p = 0.02). The number of grading categories ranged from 2 to 11; 90% with 3-5. Over 25% of the schools gave ≥40% of students the highest grade; median of 30% in the highest tier.
Conclusions:
Significant variation exists in core surgery clerkship grading between schools. Similarly, a sizeable difference exists in how grades are calculated and the reporting systems used. Standardizing grading schemes across medical schools would be beneficial.
Related Concept Videos
What is Variation?
The range, standard deviation, standard error, and variance are the different measures of variation.
Range: The range is the difference between its maximum and...
Variation
When independent and dependent variables are plotted on a scatter plot, the slope of a line is a value that describes the rate of change between the two...
Graded Potential
Graded potentials fall into two categories: depolarizing and hyperpolarizing. Depolarizing graded potentials typically occur when sodium (Na+) or...
Conservative Site-specific Recombination and Phase Variation
The recognition sites for Cre recombinase called LoxP...
Variation of Atmospheric Pressure
Assuming the air temperature is constant at a given altitude and that the ideal gas law of thermodynamics describes the atmosphere to a good approximation, one can find the variation of atmospheric pressure with height.
Let p(y) be the atmospheric pressure at...
Comparing Copy Number Variations and SNPs
Copy number variations or CNVs are the structural variations that cover more than 1kb of DNA sequence. The single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), on the other hand, is a single nucleotide change or a point mutation that is found in more than 1%...

