A new admission method may select applicants with a distinct personality profile

Medical Student Selection

Medical school admissions committees are tasked with fulfilling the values of their institutions through careful recruitment. Making accurate predictions regarding the enrollment behavior of admitted students is critical to intentionally formulating class composition and impacts long-term physician representation.

Association between HEXACO personality traits and medical specialty preferences in Mexican medical students: a cross-sectional survey

Background

Medical specialty is a critical choice in a physician’s life because it determines their professional future and medical practice. While some are motivated to choose a specific specialty based on the monetary gain it can provide, others are inspired by seeing the work performed by a physician or by a patient’s recovery. It is common to stereotype doctors’ personalities by their specialty.

Methods

This was a cross-sectional survey study in which we administered the 100-item HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised to 292 medical students between September 2018 and March 2019. We evaluated six different domains of personality traits. We also included questions about their medical specialty of choice, their least preferred specialty, and the motivation behind these choices. The participants included 175 women (59.9%) and 117 men (40.1%).

Results

When the participants were asked about their preferred type of medical specialty, 52.4% indicated a preference for surgical specialties (surgical group) vs 47.6% who preferred clinical specialties (clinical group). We found that the surgical group showed significantly higher scores for Extraversion and Organization domains, while the clinical group showed significantly higher scores on the Honesty–Humility, Emotionality, and Agreeableness domains. We identified critical differences within the overall group of medical students by their medical specialty preference.

Conclusions

Some classical stereotypes were confirmed by our results, such as surgical specialists tending to be more extroverted and organized, whereas clinical specialists were prone to being more introverted, anxious, and more emotionally attached to their patients.

Is perfect good? - Dimensions of perfectionism in newly admitted medical students

BACKGROUND

Society expects physicians to perform perfectly but high levels of perfectionism are associated with symptoms of distress in medical students. This study investigated whether medical students admitted to medical school by different selection criteria differ in the occurrence of perfectionism.

METHODS

Newly enrolled undergraduate medical students (n = 358) filled out the following instruments: Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS-H), Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS-F), Big Five Inventory (BFI-10), General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSE), Patient Health Questionnaire 9 (PHQ-9), and Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7 (GAD-7). Sociodemographic data such as age, gender, high school degrees, and the way of admission to medical school were also included in the questionnaire.

RESULTS

The 298 participating students had significantly lower scores in Socially-Prescribed Perfectionism than the general population independently of their way of admission to medical school. Students who were selected for medical school by their high school degree showed the highest score for Adaptive Perfectionism. Maladaptive Perfectionism was the strongest predictor for the occurrence symptoms of depression and anxiety regardless of the way of admission.

CONCLUSIONS

Students from all admission groups should be observed longitudinally for performance and to assess whether perfectionism questionnaires might be an additional useful instrument for medical school admission processes.