Significant demographic, legal, and educational developments during the last ten years have led medical schools to review critically their selection procedures. A critical component of this review is the selection interview, since it is an integral part of most admission processes; however, some question its value. Interviews serve four purposes: information gathering, decision making, verification of application data, and recruitment. The first and last of these merit special attention. The interview enables an admission committee to gather information about a candidate that would be difficult or impossible to obtain by any other means yet is readily evaluated in an interview. Given the recent decline in numbers of applicants to and interest in medical school, many schools are paying closer attention to the interview as a powerful recruiting tool. Interviews can be unstructured, semistructured, or structured. Structuring involves analyzing what makes a medical student successful, standardizing the questions for all applicants, providing sample answers for evaluating responses, and using panel interviews (several interviewers simultaneously with one applicant). Reliability and validity of results increase with the degree of structuring. Studies of interviewers show that they are often biased in terms of the rating tendencies (for instance, leniency or severity) and in terms of an applicant's sex, race, appearance, similarity to the interviewer, and contrast to other applicants). Training interviewers may reduce such bias. Admission committees should weigh the purposes of interviewing differently for various types of candidates, develop structured or semistructured interviews focusing on nonacademic criteria, and train the interviewers.
Although the interview is widely used in the selection of applicants for admission to U.S. medical schools, little is known about current interview practices. The authors formulated a 46-item questionnaire concerning the interview process for medical school applicants, then in 1989 sent it to admission officials at all the 127 LCME-accredited schools in the United States. The questionnaire concerned the interview's status as a predictor; interviewers and interview structure; interviewer training; and the utility of interview data. Seventy-two percent of those sent the questionnaire completed and returned it. The responding admission officials indicated that the interview had two major purposes at their schools: as a means of assessing candidates' noncognitive skills and as a public relations tool. Most schools' interview processes were loosely to moderately structured, and interviewers received minimal training. It is concluded that the interview's role is primarily subjective and that it has a definite but imprecise influence on admission decisions.
This experiential exercise is an effective, inexpensive, and easily adapted tool for promoting multiple competencies in mass health emergency preparedness for a variety of health care students including medical, veterinary, public health, and nursing students.
Medical students could be effectively taught CAM using EBM principles. In addition, a short, interactive curriculum on an important topic has a positive impact on medical students' desires to acquire new knowledge. This should be a good motivational message to family medicine educators regarding the contribution to new knowledge such as CAM.
It is likely that half of the medical schools are not attaining the MSOP objective of rigorously teaching and evaluating technical procedures. Currently, more measures and more sophisticated measures of physicians' performance are being implemented in medical practice. The authors' findings call attention to this educational need and act as a stimulus to improve this aspect of medical education.
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