RESUMEN
The authors compared the purpose,and the main content of three international standards in medical education developed by the Institute for International Medical Education (IIME), World Health Organization Western Pacific Regional Office (WHO/WPRO), and World Federation for Medical Education (WFME) respectively. The IIME's standard is deferent from the others. The IIME's standard contains seven broad educational outcome domains and 60 items in the domains. The purpose of IIME's standard is to improve the common core competency of individual medical graduates of each medical school in the world, and the standard focuses the outcome of medical education and belongs to summative individual evaluation. The WHO/WPRO's and WFME's standards are quite similar. They define the standards across nine broad areas of medical schooling divided into 38 sub-areas. The ultimate goal of the WHO/WPRO's standard is to encourage national governments to adopt a quality assurance process in medical education. The aim of the two standards is to promote the quality assurance of medical schools. Both of the two standards focus the whole process of medical schooling and medical schools, and belong to formative evaluation.