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Background: Allopathic medicine faces a daunting challenge of selecting the best applicants because of the very high applicant / matriculant ratio. The quality of graduates ultimately reflects the quality of medical practice. Alarming recent trends in physician burnout, misconduct and suicide raise questions of whether we are selecting the right candidates. The United States lags far behind the United Kingdom and Europe in the study of non-cognitive tests in medical school admissions. Although more recently, medical schools in both the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States have begun to use situational judgement tests such as CaSPER and the SJT, recently developed by the AAMC and that these tests are, in a sense non-cognitive in nature, direct personality tests per se have not been utilized. Although personality is one indelible component of the human condition, we have historically used, in the admissions process within the US, knowledge, reasoning and exam performance, all of which can be improved with practice.Methods: A popular personality measurement used over the past two decades within the US in business and industry, but not medical school has been the NEO-PI-R Test. This test has not been utilized in allopathic medicine probably because of the paucity of exploratory retrospective and validating prospective studies. The hypothesis which we tested was whether NEO-PI-R traits exhibit consistency between two institutions and whether their values show promise in predicting academic performance. Results: Our retrospective findings indicated both interinstitutional consistencies and both positive and negative predictive values for certain traits whose correlative strengths exceeded traditional premed metrics (MCAT, GPA, etc.) for early academic performance.Conclusions: Our exploratory studies should catalyze larger and more detailed confirmatory studies designed to validate the importance of personality traits not only in predicting early medical school performance but also later performance in one’s overall medical career.

The COVID-19 pandemic has mandated the use of virtual interactions in medical school. Although this falls mainly in the area of didactic instruction, of necessity, it has extended to the critical Admissions Process and the Medical School Interview itself. The California University of Science and Medicine (CUSM) with their flipped classroom approach had previously entered a virtual space of instruction even before COVID-19. Because CUSM was, in a sense, already committed to ‘virtual’ education, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, CUSM focused not on what it might lose but what it might gain and what their applicants to medical school might gain with the virtual format. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to initially compare the Virtual Interview with the traditional On-Campus (In-Person) Interview during the hybrid 2020 year when the COVID-19 pandemic began. The Virtual Interview was patterned after the On-Campus Interview with some modifications. The same faculty conducted both interviews. A number of inherent advantages of the Virtual Interview surfaced to these faculty interviewers based on their subjective observations and conclusions. The overall interviewee satisfaction with the Virtual Interview was very positive based on their subjective observations and conclusions. The objective data from the Virtual Interviews compared to the On-Campus Interviews in the hybrid year resulted in a greater percentage of both offers of acceptance (p = .001) and matriculations (p = .001). In order to strengthen our initial observations, we expanded our study to include 2 pre-COVID-19 years (2018, 2019) of exclusively On-Campus interviews (n = 743) and 1 additional COVID-19 year (2021) of exclusively Virtual Interviews (n = 529). In this expanded study, interviewee demographics were not confounding and the Virtual Interview gave rise to overall greater interviewee satisfaction (p = .001), a trend to greater interviewer satisfaction and a greater percentage of both offers of acceptance (p = .047) and matriculations (p = .036).

Physicians in Georgia were mailed a confidential survey to determine their attitudes, knowledge, and perceptions of migrant and seasonal farm workers' (MSFWs) health and health needs. Criteria for selection of the physician population included practice specialty and practice site. Only physicians specializing in Family Practice, General Practice, General Surgery, and Internal Medicine were considered. Further, only 373 practices located in 45 Non-Metropolitan Statistical Areas (Non-MSAs) counties with migrant populations of more than 100 workers in June of 1995 were selected. The 20 question survey was mailed on January 26, 1996, and data collection ended on April 12, 1996. Two hundred and seven surveys were received, representing a response rate of 55.5%. According to all physicians reporting to treat MSFWs (n = 152), hypertension, gastrointestinal problems, dental problems, muscu-loskeletal problems, and diabetes were the top 5 health related problems associated with this special population. Th...

The DISCOVER Program (American College Testing Program, 1995) is a widely used computer-assisted guidance program that reportedly increases career decidedness by providing users with a computer generated list of occupations representing a congruent fit between the individual's personality and possible work environments. A review of the literature, however, suggested a need for additional research exploring the effectiveness of DISCOVER with and without counselor intervention with various populations grouped by combinations of age, sex, and race. This article describes the effects of a counselor-plus-computer and computer-only intervention on increasing the level of career decidedness in a sample population of university students. Results of the study indicate that both the computer-only and counselor-plus-computer experimental conditions were significantly different from the delayed treatment control group. The results further indicate that the counselor-plus-computer experimental condition was significantly different from both the delayed treatment control group and the computer-only experimental condition group. No significance was found when controlling for age, gender, and race. Implication of the study's findings are discussed.