Postbaccalaureate Medical/Dental Education Preparatory Program (MEDPREP) at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

Between 1972 and 1998, the state and federally funded Medical/Dental Education Preparatory Program (MEDPREP) at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine served approximately 900 qualified minority and disadvantaged students, in an effort to increase the number of underrepresented-minority (URM) students accepted into and retained in health professions schools. To help students improve their application credentials, this post-baccalaureate program establishes high expectations for student progress, designs individual curricula, offers extensive academic and personal counseling, has its own teaching faculty, and operates in a specially equipped, designated facility. This supportive educational environment has demonstrated success. By 1998 over 500 MEDPREP students had been accepted into medical or other health professions schools, and 86% of them had graduated or were scheduled to graduate. And while the number of new URM entrants to medical schools declined nationwide from 1995 to 1997, 70 URM students from MEDPREP matriculated to 28 different allopathic medical schools, eight entered three different osteopathic medical schools, and two entered dental schools. Recent data indicate that the score changes of Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) repeaters who were MEDPREP students were larger than those of all MCAT repeaters reported by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). In fact, the MEDPREP repeaters' score changes were two to nearly six times greater than the overall changes reported by the AAMC. These gains suggest that a carefully designed, long-term post-baccalaureate intervention such as MEDPREP can increase the pool of qualified URM and disadvantaged students accepted into and retained in health professions schools.

Relationship between scores on developing cognitive abilities test and scores on medical college admissions test for nontraditional premedical students.

The relationship of students' performance on the Developing Cognitive Abilities Test (DCAT), a test of scholastic aptitude, and their subsequent performance on the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) were examined for 122 nontraditional premedical students who participated in a medical educational preparatory program. A stepwise multiple regression analysis produced moderate, though significant multiple correlations among subscores on the two tests. While there were a few exceptions, for the most part all of the subscores on the Developing Cognitive Abilities Test made a significant contribution to the regression equation in the prediction of scores on MCAT subtests. Implications for the value of the Developing Cognitive Abilities Test as an admissions tool as well as providing direction for possible intervention are discussed.