Medical school admissions is a contentious and high stakes selection activity. Many assessment approaches are available to support selection; but how are decisions about building, monitoring, and adapting admissions systems made? What shapes the processes and practices that underpin selection decisions? We explore how these decisions are made…

Medical-school applicants learn from many sources that they must stand out to fit in. Many construct self-presentations intended to appeal to medical-school admissions committees from the raw materials of work and volunteer experiences, in order to demonstrate that they will succeed in a demanding profession to which access is tightly controlled.…

Recent statistics found the prevalence of dyslexia in UK medical schools to be 7%, sitting below the national prevalence of 10%. The factors contributing to this discrepancy are currently unknown, but may result from an interplay of individual and systemic barriers to entering medicine. This collaborative, analytic autoethnography aimed to use the…

Student diversity in health professions education (HPE) can be affected by selection procedures. Little is known about how different selection tools impact student diversity across programs using different combinations of traditional and broadened selection criteria. The present multi-site study examined the chances in selection of subgroups of…

This study examines the way in which student characteristics and pre-admissions measures are statistically associated with the likelihood a student will require remediation for academic and professionalism offenses. We anchor our inquiry within Irby and Hamstra's (2016) conceptual framework of constructs of professionalism. Data from five…

Medical schools worldwide undertake widening access (WA) initiatives (e.g. pipeline, outreach and academic enrichment programmes) to support pupils from high schools which do not traditionally send high numbers of applicants to medicine. UK literature indicates that pupils in these schools feel that their teachers are ill-equipped, cautious or…

Medical school selection is currently in the paradoxical situation in which selection tools may predict study outcomes, but which constructs are actually doing the predicting is unknown (the 'black box of selection'). Therefore, our research focused on those constructs, answering the question: do the internal structures of the tests in an…

Recent years have seen leading medical educationalists repeatedly call for a paradigm shift in the way we view, value and use subjectivity in assessment. The argument is that subjective expert raters generally bring desired quality, not just noise, to performance evaluations. While several reviews document the psychometric qualities of the…

The extant literature has largely ignored a potentially significant source of variance in multiple mini-interview (MMI) scores by "hiding" the variance attributable to the sample of attributes used on an evaluation form. This potential source of hidden variance can be defined as rating items, which typically comprise an MMI evaluation…

The purpose of this study was to provide validity and feasibility evidence in measuring professionalism using the Professionalism Mini-Evaluation Exercise (P-MEX) scores as part of a residency admissions process. In 2012 and 2013, three standardized-patient-based P-MEX encounters were administered to applicants invited for an interview at the…

In medical school selection, non-cognitive performance in particular correlates with performance in clinical practice. It is arguable, therefore, that selection should focus on non-cognitive aspects despite the predictive value of prior cognitive performance for early medical school performance. The aim of this study at Radboud University Medical…

Many different medical school selection processes are used worldwide. In this paper, we examine the effect of (1) participation, and (2) selection in a voluntary selection process on study performance. We included data from two cohorts of medical students admitted to Erasmus MC, Rotterdam and VUmc, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and compared them to…

Web-based interviewing may be an effective element of a medical school's larger approach to promotion of holistic review, as recommended by the Association of American Medical Colleges, by facilitating the feasibility of including rural and community physicians in the interview process. Only 10% of medical schools offer videoconference interviews…

Several medical schools include candidates' extracurricular activities in their selection procedure, with promising results regarding their predictive value for achievement during the clinical years of medical school. This study aims to reveal whether the better achievement in clinical training of students selected on the basis of their…

Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs) are increasingly used for medical school selection. Scoring an SJT is more complicated than scoring a knowledge test, because there are no objectively correct answers. The scoring method of an SJT may influence the construct and concurrent validity and the adverse impact with respect to non-traditional students.…