Measuring differential attainment: a longitudinal analysis of assessment results for 1512 medical students at four Scottish medical schools.

To measure Differential Attainment (DA) among Scottish medical students and to explore whether attainment gaps increase or decrease during medical school. A retrospective analysis of undergraduate medical student performance on written assessment, measured at the start and end of medical school. Four Scottish medical schools (universities of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow). 1512 medical students who attempted (but did not necessarily pass) final written assessment. The study modelled the change in attainment gap during medical school for four student demographical categories (white/non-white, international/Scottish domiciled, male/female and with/without a known disability) to test whether the attainment gap grew, shrank or remained stable during medical school. Separately, the study modelled the expected versus actual frequency of different demographical groups in the top and bottom decile of the cohort. The attainment gap grew significantly for white versus non-white students ( The tendency for attainment gaps to grow during undergraduate medical education suggests that educational factors at medical schools may-however inadvertently-contribute to DA. It is of critical importance that medical schools investigate attainment gaps within their cohorts and explore potential underlying causes.

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Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Competing interests: All authors have completed the ICMJE Uniform Disclosure Form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf and declare that all authors had financial support from the Scottish Medical Education Research Consortium (SMERC) for the submitted work, no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years and no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work