Numerical versus narrative: A comparison between methods to measure medical student performance during clinical clerkships.

Background: Medical school evaluations typically rely on both language-based narrative descriptions and psychometrically converted numeric scores to convey performance to the grading committee. We evaluated inter-rater reliability and correlation of numeric versus narrative evaluations for students on their Neurology Clerkship.

Design/methods: 50 Neurology Clerkship in-training evaluation reports completed by their residents and faculty members at the University of Rochester School of Medicine were dissected into narrative and numeric components.