Size matters: what influences medical students' choice of study site?

Background: The University of British Columbia, Canada doubled its class intake in 2004, creating, in addition to its main metropolitan campus, 2 distributed campuses, one in a medium sized island city, and the other in a small geographically isolated northern city. Our admission process attempts to identify students more suitable for education in our northern, rural site. Students also indicate their preferred site.

Medical student selection: choice of a semi-structured panel interview or an unstructured one-on-one interview.

Reliability has been shown to be higher in structured medical admissions interviews as compared to unstructured interviews. This study reports the comparison of a proposed semi-structured panel interview with a current individual unstructured medical admissions interview. Inter-rater reliability coefficients were calculated, and correlations were estimated between panel, individual and academic scores.