Rendimiento académico en el primer año y su relación con las variables de ingreso en las escuelas de medicina / Academic performance in the first year and it relation with admission variables in medical schools

ABSTRACT

Chilean universities employ a common admission scoring system for students, based on high school grades, mathematic and verbal academic aptitude tests, and specific biology and social sciences tests. Aiming to know the predictive values of these tests, the standarized scores obtained in the selection tests and academic performance of 1094 first year medical students, admitted in 1989 and 1990 to six universities, were analyzed. These students obtained high admission scores and their academic performance during the first year was low (mean grades ranged from 4.6 ñ 0.6 to 5.28 ñ 0.5 in different universities for a scale from 1 to 7). In all, except one university there was a correlation between admission scores and academic performance. Multiple regression analysis showed that admission scores explained a 13 percent of performance and that the parameters with better predictive value were high school grades, biology test and mathematics academic aptitude test, Verbal academic aptitude test did not have a predictive value