Relationship between students' socio economic profile and preadmission academic streaming to their academic performance in MD programme, Universiti Sains Malaysia

Introduction: The cross-sectional retrospective study was conducted at School of Medical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia to explore the relationship between medical students' socioeconomic profile and preadmission academic streaming with their academic performance in medical schooL Methods: The records of the medical students who graduated from 2003 to 2007 ( 5 batches) were studied. A total of 84 7 student files were scrutinized and 42 were excluded from the study due to inconsistencies and /or incomplete data. A total of 805 folders were included in the study. Results: Ninety five percent (95%) of the records were accepted for the study purpose. From a total of 805 medical students involved in this study, the average number of graduating students per year is between 18.95% to 20.9%. Female graduates were sixty seven percent (67%) and seventy five percent (75%) of the graduates were from Malay ethnicity. The main entry stream was Matriculation 75% and 22% was from STPM. About 79% graduates had Biology background. Repeated measure ANNOY A analysis showed significant positive association between female and Chinese graduates (p <0. 05) with good performance in medical school. There was no significant association between graduate parents' occupation and house income with their performance in medical school. STPM had a strong positive association with the performance in all professional examinations and -being higher throughout the study period compared to Matriculation and other groups of graduates (p < 0. 05}. The Matriculation group had significantly low scores throughout the study period compared to STPM and others group (p < 0. 05). Having Biology in preadmission course is also a better predictor for improved performance than physics background graduates in medical course. (p< 0. 05) Conclusion: The identified factors that are associated with good performance in medical school are female gender, Chinese ethnicity, STPM stream and the subject Biology in preadmission course. The study suggests that there is a positive relationship between some of the students' profiles and preadmission entry streaming to the subsequent performance in USM medical school