Assessing Personal Qualities in Medical School Admissions

Abstract

The authors analyze the challenges to using academic measures (MCAT scores and GPAs) as thresholds for admissions and, for applicants exceeding the threshold, using personal qualities for admission decisions; review the literature on using the medical school interview and other admission data to assess personal qualities of applicants; identify challenges of developing better methods of assessing personal qualities; and propose a unified system for assessment. The authors discuss three challenges to using the threshold approach: institutional self-interest, inertia, and philosophical and historical factors. Institutional self-interest arises from the potential for admitting students with lower academic credentials, which could negatively influence indicators used to rank medical schools. Inertia can make introducing a new system complex. Philosophical and historical factors are those that tend to value maximizing academic measures. The literature identifies up to 87 different personal qualities relevant to the practice of medicine, and selecting the most salient of these that can be practically measured is a challenging task. The challenges to developing better personal quality measures include selecting and operationally defining the most important qualities, measuring the qualities in a cost-effective manner, and overcoming "cunning" adversaries who, with the incentive and resourcefulness, can potentially invalidate such measures. The authors discuss potential methods of measuring personal qualities and propose a unified system of assessment that would pool resources from certification and recertification efforts to develop competencies across the continuum with a dynamic, integrated approach to assessment.

Response distortion on personality tests in applicants: comparing high-stakes to low-stakes medical settings

“…Despite their importance, it remains unclear how best to measure these characteristics, particularly in the context of high-stakes testing where applicants may be motivated to distort their responses (Albanese et al, 2003;Bore et al, 2009;Musson, 2009;Patterson et al, 2016). In recent years, a variety of selection tools have been developed that aim to assess these noncognitive characteristics, including situational judgment tests (Bore et al, 2009;De Leng et al, 2017;Lievens, 2013;Patterson et al, 2012;Patterson et al, 2009), multiple mini-interviews (Eva et al, 2014;Eva et al, 2009;Eva et al, 2004;Griffin et al, 2012a;Kulasegaram et al, 2010), emotional intelligence tests (Libbrecht et al, 2014), and personality tests (Griffin et al, 2012b;MacKenzie et al, 2017;Rothstein et al, 2006).…”

The desirable qualities of future doctors – A study of medical student perceptions

“…Nevertheless, these desirable qualities of the 'ideal' doctor have been difficult to define and the existing literature lacks a general consensus on these (Albanese et al 2003). Despite the innovations made in processes and methods for medical student selection (Eva et al 2004), inconsistent terminology is used to describe conceptually similar qualities.…”

An evaluation of the multiple mini-interview as a selection tool for dental students

“…It is known that a personal interview may be a poor indicator of future performance in health care professions 2 and does not always explore non-cognitive traits such as empathy, ethical understanding or indeed communication. 3,4 While structured interviews have been used by some in order to assess medical students, they too have suffered from problems with regard to reliability and predictability. [5][6][7][8] Objective This research evaluated the mutliple mini-interview (MMI) process as part of the admissions procedure for a dental school.…”