Admision system, personal characteristics and academia performance

Abstract

Background: Public Spanish universities employ a common admission scoring system for students based on high school grades and the PAU (Access university essay). Aiming to know the predictive values of this admission method and other student factors, we studied whether there is a relationship between any of those variables and academic performance in the first year discipline Gross Anatomy. Summary of work: We analysed the group of students admitted to our Medical Faculty in 2004-2005 and studied the relation between sex, age, admission marks, educational background, motivation for medical studies or personal interests and the scores obtained in Gross Anatomy. Summary of work: The students had had high admission scores. However, this fact was not related to the results obtained in the subject studied. Factors like sex, motivations for choosing medical studies and educational background showed differences in their relationships with the admission scores and with the scores obtained in the discipline. Interestingly, the students who were not sure why they had chosen medical studies and those who had chosen them only because they like them, obtained better scores in our discipline than those who had chosen them for humanitarian, economic or scientific interests. Besides, activities like playing sports showed to be a beneficial factor