• Katharine J Reid, Agnes E Dodds, and Geoffrey J McColl.
• Medical Education Unit, Melbourne Medical School, The University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia. kjreid@unimelb.edu.au
• Med Teach. 2012 Jan 1;34(2):168-71.

BackgroundRecent evidence suggests that graduate-entry medical students may have a marginal academic performance advantage over undergraduate entrants in a pre-clinical curriculum in both bioscience knowledge and clinical skills assessments. It is unclear whether this advantage is maintained in the clinical phase of medical training.AimThe study aimed to compare graduate and undergraduate entrants undertaking an identical clinical curriculum on assessments undertaken during clinical training in the medical course.MethodsClinical assessment results for four cohorts of medical students (n = 713) were compared at the beginning and at the end of clinical training for graduate and undergraduate entrants.ResultsResults showed that graduate- and undergraduate-entry medical students performed similarly on clinical assessments. Female students performed consistently better than male students.ConclusionThe findings of this study suggest that any academic performance advantage held by graduate-entry medical students is limited to the early years of the medical course, and is not evident during clinical training in the later years of the course.

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