Student performance in internal medicine: the effect of previous clerkship experience

To test the assumption that students who have completed other clerkships are likely to perform better in internal medicine, the authors undertook a prospective study of 160 senior students from two classes. Groups of students with little or no senior clerkship experience before their internal medicine clerkship were compared with groups of students who had extensive clerkship experience in disciplines other than medicine. Groups were compared with respect to ward-performance scores and scores on identical multiple-choice examinations. Neither ward-performance nor multiple-choice scores revealed differences attributable to previous clerkship experience. It is concluded that despite areas of instruction and experience which overlap between medicine and other disciplines, previous clerkship experience apparently does not have a beneficial effect on student performance in internal medicine, as measured by these two commonly used methods of evaluation.