Student perceptions of the learning environment in a new medical school

Students' perceptions of their learning environment in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Newcastle were tested in 1979, in the second year of the school's existence, when the first two cohorts of students were surveyed. It was thought important to re-test those same cohorts in 1982, when they were in the later years of the curriculum, to see whether their perceptions had changed, and also to test the perceptions of subsequent cohorts of students (still in the earlier years of the course) to examine whether the favourable perceptions of the earlier cohorts were being maintained. Accordingly, this paper reports the results of a cross-sectional study undertaken on all five years of Newcastle medical students in 1982, and it compares their perceptions with those obtained 3 years earlier.