THERE IS mounting concern within the medical profession about the suitability of a new aptitude test as a means of deciding who gets coveted medical school places.
It follows the results of a recent study into how doctors and medical students perform in a modified form of the Health Professions Admissions Test (HPat).
Students and parents are also concerned that those obtaining grinds in preparation for HPat are outperforming those who do not specifically study for the test.
According to the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), which designs and administers the HPat, it is not possible to coach success in the test.
The council said an examination of the performance of those who decide to sit it again shows little improvement.
“ACER does not recommend or endorse any commercially available courses offering HPat-Ireland preparation,” it said.
However, The Irish Times is aware of a number of candidates who performed relatively poorly in the medical school entry test in 2009, but whose scores improved significantly in this year’s HPat after they had undertaken specific “grinds” to help them prepare for the test.
In one instance, a young woman with 600 points in her Leaving Cert but who reached only the 57th percentile in the 2009 HPat increased her score to the 97th percentile in this year’s examination.
Her combined Leaving Cert points score and HPat score mean she is now guaranteed to be offered the medical school place which was denied to her last year.
The HPat purports to test a candidate’s ability to reason, think logically and understand the thought process, emotions and intentions of other people.
In theory, experienced doctors should outperform potential medical students on HPat testing if the examination is a true measure of problem-solving skills and the ability to understand human behaviour.
However, research published in the current issue of the Irish Medical Journal has found that consultants who sat a modified HPat had poorer average scores than students of graduate medical schools in the Republic.
Of some 222 candidates who sat the HPat, junior doctors training to be surgeons had the lowest average scores. The consultant surgeons scored marginally better than the undergraduate medical students.
But the top performers were those who had entered the medical schools as mature students, having first obtained an initial degree in another discipline.
Commenting on the outcome of their research, Arnold Hill, professor of surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons, and his fellow authors said: “We would have expected that consultants with years of experience accrued in the clinical, research and academic fields would have outperformed students.
“The ability to interpret data along with the more intuitive ‘wait and see’ decisions, combined with the ability to make a decision based on suboptimal knowledge and change as the situation evolves, are critical determinants in the performance of a doctor.
“These are skills gained with time and experience, and would be akin to the traits purported to be tested by the aptitude tests.
“If [the test is] a true measure of these skills, consultants should clearly have scored higher.”