gms | German Medical Science

Medical College Admission Tests (MCAT) fulfill the demand of selecting potential students and are used as predictors for the educational success of the college applicants. Admission tests thus have to

1.

guarantee the fair and reproducible allocation of limited university places to a preferably diverse future student population,

2.

should select those applicants who, with the greatest probability, develop exactly those abilities and/or abilities/characteristics that are expected from future physicians, and

3.

should identify those applicants who show the greatest probability of finishing the course of study [1], [2].

Whereas in the US the development and application of the MCAT can look back on a history of more than eight decades, the medical universities in Austria have been confronted with admission restrictions, and the resulting selection of students or the conception of selection processes since the academic year 2006/2007 [2].

As only selection criterion for admission to medical college, and due to the basic science knowledge gap (gender gap) – consistently observed since used for the first time – the admission tests at the Medical Universities of Graz, Innsbruck and Vienna are centers of attention in the public media [3].

Is the only one of the three Austrian medical universities, the Medical University of Graz has amended its admission process (cognitive testing with the subsections biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics as well as the testing of text comprehension) by including a written Situational Judgment Test (SJT) in the year 2010.

Despite some concerns regarding the SJT expressed in the literature, particularly the possibility to confront future students with the importance of the bio-psycho-social model was decisive for this extension [4], [5].

On the basis of results obtained during three admission procedures (2010 to 2012), the purposes of the present study are:

• examining (socio-scientific, latent) constructs that are discussed in the literature in connection with medical college admission tests in general, and in connection with the administration of situational judgment tests in particular, and reporting correlations between the chosen constructs via structure equation models;
• examining which latent constructs influence the present indicator variables to what extent; respectively, what the correlations are between latent variables (endogenic/exogenic) and indicators (measuring model);
• examining whether the correlations between latent and indicator variables is representable as direct or indirect influence, and which causal effective direction can be evaluated;
• examining how to define the structure model, i.e., the correlations of the putative latent variables with each other