A Preliminary Study of the Value of Personality Assessment in Medical School Admissions within the United States

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.