CONTEXT Medical schools in Western societies seek measures to increase the diversity of their student bodies with respect to ethnicity and social background. Currently, little is known about the effects of different selection procedures on student diversity. OBJECTIVES This prospective cohort study aimed to determine performance differences between traditional and non-traditional (i.e. ethnic...

INTRODUCTION The Student Counselling Service at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark, has experienced an increase in medical students with poor mental well-being. MATERIAL AND METHODS This was a descriptive, retrospective survey of 1,056 medical students commencing their studies in the period from September 2003 to February 2006. The study had a four-year follow-up perio...

The United Kingdom Clinical Aptitude Test (UKCAT) was introduced to assist in identification of applicants from all levels of society with the appropriate characteristics to become good doctors. Evidence that the UKCAT has achieved such widened participation (WP) in applicants to medical school remains elusive. One of the limitations to WP investigation has been that data on socioeconomic statu...

Background Despite efforts to construct targeted medical school admission processes using applicant-level correlates of future practice location, accurately gauging applicants' interests in rural medicine remains an imperfect science. This study explores the usefulness of textual analysis to identify rural-oriented themes and values underlying applicants' open-ended responses to admission essay...

INTRODUCTION Our objective is to evaluate the factors important to osteopathic applicants when selecting an American College of Osteopathic Emergency Physicians accredited emergency medicine (EM) residency and to compare these results with previous allopathic EM studies. METHODS We gave osteopathic applicants a survey during interview season to be filled out anonymously at the end of their in...

Employment discrimination causes problems at the labor market, and is hard to combat. Can increasing the degree of structure when selecting applicants increase fairness? Students were asked to perform a computerized selection task and were either provided with tools for systematizing information about the applicants (structured selection) or no such tools (unstructured selection). We hypothesiz...

Sweden has a two-step selection process for admission to higher education. Eligibility is assessed to ensure that the candidates have the ability to take the course/programme. Selections are made based in part on other measures. The focus here is eligibility, particularly the 25:4 scheme, a measure introduced to widen access to higher education in the 1970s but since abandoned. An age of 25 and...

This study investigated impression management tactic use during structured interviews containing both experience-based and situational questions. Specifically, the authors examined whether applicants' use of impression management tactics depended on question type. Results from 119 structured interviews indicated that almost all of the applicants used some form of impression management. Signific...

Recruiters infer personal traits from job applicants’ resumés and use these inferences in evaluating job applicants’ employability. No research to date, however, has determined if resumé reviewers’ inferences of applicants’ personality drawn solely from resumé biographical data are valid. In the present study, resumé reviewers (N552) examined one of two applicant resumés and then described the ...