The Relationship Between Accreditation Cycle and Licensing Examination Scores: A National Look.

Purpose: Accreditation aims to ensure all training programs meet agreed-upon standards of quality. The process is complex, resource intensive, and costly. Its benefits are difficult to assess because contextual confounds obscure comparisons between systems that do and do not include accreditation. This study explores accreditation's influence "within system" by investigating the relationship between accreditation cycle and performance on a national licensing examination.

Method: Scores on the computer-based portion of the Medical Council of Canada Qualifying Examination Part I, from 1993 to 2017, were examined for all 17 Canadian medical schools. Typically completed upon graduation from medical school, results within each year were transformed for comparability across administrations and linked to timing within each school's accreditation cycle. ANOVAs were used to assess the relationship between accreditation timing and examination scores. Secondary analyses isolated 4-year from 3-year training programs and separated data generated before versus after implementation of a national midcycle informal review program.

Results: Performance on the licensing exam was highest during and shortly after an accreditation site visit, falling significantly until the midpoint in the accreditation cycle (d = 0.47) before rising again. This pattern disappeared after introduction of informal interim review, but too little data have accumulated post implementation to determine if interim review is sufficient to break the influence of accreditation cycle.

Conclusions: Formal, externally driven, accreditation cycles appear associated with educational processes in ways that translated into student outcomes on a national licensing examination. Whether informal, internal, interim reviews can mediate this effect remains to be seen.