Evaluation of Psychological Factors in Medical School Admissions Decisions.

Medical school admissions committees are expected to select physicians with specific attributes such as intelligence, altruism, dutifulness, and compassion. Besides basing these attributes on the best professional judgment of the physicians and medical school faculty, there has been little quantitative research to determine the psychological factors that predict success as a physician, medical student, or premedical student. It was hypothesized that a combination of preadmission factors and psychological variables would predict academic performance in premedical studies better than preadmission alone. Participants (n=371) were premedical students in a combined bachelor's-M.D. degree program. Preadmission factors were obtained from student records and included high school grade-point averages (GPA), American College Test Composite scores, gender, and racial/ethnic classification. Psychological factors were measured using 40 variables from Cattell's Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, Lanyon's Psychological Screening Inventory, the California Occupational Preference System Inventory, and a modified Thematic Apperception Test. Results show that psychological factors improved the prediction of overall GPA and college science-mathematics GPA. Multiple correlations for the overall GPA increased from .33 using only preadmission variables to .42 when personality variables were added to the analysis. The science-mathematics GPA correlations showed a similar improvement going from .33 to .43 when the psychological factors were added. Contains 22 references. (EMS)