gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: Doctors with different personalities tend to develop different competencies [1] and choose different primary-care or specialised careers [2]. These tendencies may partly be anticipated during admission to medical school [2].

Aim: To examine the detection of differential competencies in medical school applicants.

Methods: Two approaches were used:

• Analysis of the results of a nationwide survey on the Test for Medical Studies (TMS; n=2915; TMS participants: n=1903)
• Analysis of a survey among medical program starters (3 cohorts, n=384) with respect to their eventual performance in courses and OSCEs reflecting different competencies

Results:

• TMS survey: Different participant subsets occupied the upper quartiles with respect to the school-leaving grade and to the scores in the verbal-mathematical and the visual-spatial part of the TMS, indicating different innate cognitive competencies. Sciences, mathematics, and economics as main school subjects predicted success in the verbal-mathematical part of the TMS. Music and arts predicted success in its visual-spatial part.
• Starter survey: Students without parental financial support generally performed less well than others but had advantages in OSCE tasks pertaining to knowledge application and manual performance. They were mostly older students with inferior school-leaving grades but previous vocational training. Children of non-academic fathers had an advantage in communicative OSCE tasks, whereas children of academic mothers had an advantage in manual tasks. Different reasons for studying medicine (altruistic, extrinsic) except for interest in sciences did not predict differential performances.

Discussion: Medical school starters may have different cognitive and non-cognitive abilities and eventually they may develop different competencies. Their competencies may be influenced by the familial and school background and can at least in part be detected in the selection process. This should be considered in the development of admission instruments targeting at diversity. Furthermore, curricular competency training should be adapted to the diversity of the students with respect to their innate tendencies.