Medical school entrants: semi-structured interview ratings, prior scholastic achievement and personality profiles

The Faculty of Medicine at Monash University has decided to take personal qualities as appraised by semi-structured interviews into account alongside academic merit for selection of undergraduate students. To develop competence in these techniques the Faculty interviewed entrants, rather than applicants, in 1991 and 1992. Interviewing panels consist of three members--a member of the Faculty of Medicine, a member of the association of Monash Medical Graduates Inc. and an outside person who is not involved in medicine. The qualities appraised fall into four fields--quality of motivation, appropriateness of cognitive style, appropriateness of interpersonal style and communication skill. Interviewers are also asked to rate the overall suitability of the interviewee for medical studies and medical practice. A pilot study has also been run to explore the value of a psychometric test, the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), as another adjunct to the selection procedure. In this report interview ratings are analysed in relation to both prior scholastic results and scores obtained on the CPI. The study showed that the interview scores have little overlap with prior scholastic results. The associations between interview ratings and CPI scores were often highly significant from a statistical point of view and thus confirm through a different instrument that the interviews do meaningfully appraise personal attributes. However, the correlations are modest in terms of the amount of variance which is shared, suggesting that the CPI could be advantageously used as another component of our selection process.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)