Selecting the 'right' medical students: Is there a future role for psychometric personality testing?

TL;DRAbstract

Strong community expectations that doctors display high standards of professionalism and integrity place an obligation on medical schools to select candidates who possess the intellectual ability and personal characteristics to become clinically effective, ethically sensitive doctors. In spite of relatively robust selection processes, medical schools typically report that between 5-15% of students display poor professional behaviours [1-3]. A number of professional regulatory bodies use psychometric testing as a means of screening potential members for personality traits that are predictive of poor professionalism. However, the use of psychometric testing in the selection of future medical practitioners has received limited attention in Australia. This pilot, longitudinal research project was initiated at Griffith University School of Medicine in 2009 to explore whether psychometric personality tests may be a useful tool in identifying a correlation between the student's academic perfo

Chat with Paper

AI Agents for this Paper