A study of faculty attitudes toward Ohio State's three-year medical program

Three-year curricula, once a proliferating innovation in medical education, are now rapidly waning with the fading of capitation support and the easing of physician manpower shortages. In this article the authors examine faculty opinion of a three-year medical program at the Ohio State University. Using a Likert attitude-scaling technique, the authors developed a questionnaire and administered it to full-time faculty members. Five issues upon which faculty opinion was found to be most diverse include: adequacy of content in a three-year program, time available for faculty to do research, work demands on faculty, basic medical knowledge of three-year students, and quality of post-M.D. positions obtained by three-year graduates. Overall, three general deficiencies in the three-year curriculum, as perceived by faculty, emerged: students have limited instruction in basic medical knowledge and skills; unnecessary emotional, physical, and economic demands are imposed; and neither student learning nor quality of teaching is enhanced.