A structured interview for medical school admission, phase 1: Initial procedures and results

Purpose. Despite their widespread use, medical school admission interviews often are unstructured and lack reliability. This report describes the deve lopment of a structured admission interview designed to eliminate bias and provide valid information for selecting medical students, with preliminary information about the interview's reliability and validity. Method. After screening applications, 490 applicants to a public medical sc hool residency program were interviewed by two faculty members using a stru ctured interview format. Interview scores were compiled and correlated with undergraduate grade-point averages (GPAs); Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores; Iowa Evaluation Form (IEF) scores, an in-house evaluation of applicants' noncognitive abilities; and eventual admissions status. Results. Interrater agreement was good; the percentages of rater pairs whos e scores differed by one point or less ranged from 87% to 98%. Scores on th e structured interview revealed low to moderate correlations with other adm ission criteria: .10 (p < .05) for cumulative GPA, .18 (P < .01) for MCAT B iological Science, .08 (p > .05) MCAT Physical Science, and .10 (p < .05) h MCAT Verbal Reasoning. None of the correlations between the overall interv iew scores and the IEF scores reached statistical significance (p = .05). H igher overall scores on the structured interview did predict: a greater lik elihood of being accepted into the medical school and the interview score a ccounted for 20% of the incremental variance in admission status beyond GPA , MCAT, and IEF scores. Conclusions. The moderate-to-low correlations with other admission criteria suggest that the interview provided information about candidate credential s not obtained from other sources and accounted for a substantial proportio n of the variance in admission status. This finding supports the considerab le time and resources required to develop a structured interview for medica l student admissions. Final judgment on the validity and utility of this in terview should be made after follow-up performance data have been obtained and analyzed.