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A great number of overseas students have studied medicine at Jinan University Medical School over the past decade. Statistics from the past ten years show that these students' test scores on diagnosis and medicine I & II are lower than those of their classmates from mainland China. To address the underlying causes of this phenomenon, we implemented a series of questionnaires for overseas and mainland Chinese medical students. The results indicate that there are no significant differences between overseas students and mainland Chinese students with regard to their attitude towards the study of medicine, their approval of the teaching and learning environments or their ability to improve their independent study capabilities at Jinan University Medical School; however, overseas students prefer to study at night and sleep later than their mainland Chinese classmates. One outstanding difference between these groups is that overseas students like to arrange their studies based on their interests, regardless of available time and subject contents, and this might lead them to perform poorly on examinations during their academic term at Jinan University Medical School. Overseas students might not have achieved scores as high as their Chinese classmates is that they do not completely focus on the content taught by teachers in class, which would later be assessed by exams at the end of each academic term. This observation is actually part of our medical educational concepts, especially in Chinese medical schools. Attention should be paid by both overseas students and medical schools to this discrepancy.