RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ACADEMIC-PERFORMANCE AND ADMISSION VARIABLES AMONG FIRST YEAR MEDICAL-STUDENT

Chilean universities employ a common admission scoring system for stud ents, based on high school grades, mathematic and verbal academic apti tude tests, and specific biology and social sciences tests. Aiming to know the predictive values of these tests, the standardized scores obt ained in the selection tests and academic performance of 1094 first ye ar medical students, admitted in 1989 and 1990 to six universities, we re analyzed. These students obtained high admission scores and their a cademic performance during the first year was low (mean grades ranged from 4.6 +/- 0.6 to 5.28 +/- 0.5 in different universities for a scale from 1 to 7). In al, except one university there was a correlation be tween admission scores and academic performance. Multiple regression a nalysis showed that admission scores explained a 13% of performance an d that the parameters with better predictive value were high school gr ades, biology test and mathematics academic aptitude test. Verbal acad emic aptitude test did not have a predictive value.