Planning and Implementing an Online Undergraduate Medical Student Selection Exercise during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Experience of the School of Medical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia

This article described the context, planning and implementation of a video-conference-based undergraduate student selection exercise held in response to restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. A task force has brainstormed the ideas and decided a face-to-face interview using a video conferencing application which was the best way to achieve the objective set for the exercise. Facilitators communicated with interviewers and candidates, and hosted video meetings between the two parties. Interviewers were trained using online videos, a webinar and a trial run. They rated candidates using a printed rating instrument as well as an online form. About 615 candidates were interviewed in this study. Initial impressions were positive and will be followed-up by a proper evaluation.

Medical Student Selection

This is included in the attached word document Many medical schools rely solely on their Admissions Committee members or core faculty for all aspects of the admissions process. In a distributed campus model, involving stakeholders from different contexts and campuses, can help medical schools diversify the participants in each step of the admissions process, from recruitment, to screening, to interviewing, to selection. Using the regional campus structure poses an advantage to embed multiple constituents, including faculty, staff, and community members, into the entire process supporting collective input in training future physicians for those communities and provides the opportunity for more people to become aware of institutional missions and to become invested in the holistic review framework used for candidate selection. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. This work does require human subjects review.

Admitting Deserving Medical Students from Rural and Disadvantaged: Patan Academy of Health Sciences’ Approach

Background: Patan Academy of Health Sciences (PAHS) aims to produce physicians who would be able and willing to serve in the rural areas. Recognizing the critical importance of student selection strategy, among others, in achieving the program goals, it has adopted an innovative scheme for selecting medical students. This paper describes PAHS medical student selection scheme that favors enrollment of deserving applicants from rural and disadvantaged groups so as to help improve distribution of physicians in rural Nepal.Methods: A student admission committee comprising a group of medical educators finalized a three-step student selection scheme linked with scholarships after reviewing relevant literatures and consultative meetings with experts within and outside Nepal. The committee did local validation of Personal Quality Assessment (PQA) that tested cognitive ability and personality traits, Admission OSPE (Objective Structured Performance Examination) that assessed non-cognitive attributes of applicants. It also provided preferential credits to applicants’ socio-economic characteristics to favor the enrollment of deserving applicants from rural and disadvantaged groups through Social Inclusion Matrix (SIM). Three different categories of scholarship schemes namely Partial, Collaborative and Full were devised with Partial providing 50% and other two categories each providing 100% coverage of tuition fee.Results: PAHS student selection scheme succeeded in enrolling more than half of its students from rural areas of Nepal, including about 10% of the students from that of the most backward region of the country. About one third of students were female and about the same were from public and community school. Sixty percent of students receive different categories of scholarships.Conclusions: Limited findings indicate the success of the selection scheme in enrolling high proportion of applicants from rural and disadvantageous groups and enable them to pursue study by providing scholarships.