Predictors of first-year GPA of medical students: a longitudinal study of 1285 matriculates in China

BMC Medical Education

Research Article

Cheng-Hua Peng¹  Zhi-Tao Zhao¹  Ying-Xue Zhou²  Li Li²  Cheng-Song Wan²  Jun Yang²  Chun-Quan Ou² 

[1] Office of Academic Affairs, Southern Medical University, 510515, Guangzhou, China;School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Southern Medical University, 510515, Guangzhou, China;

关键词: National College Entrance Examination;    First-year GPA;    Medical students;    China;    Hierarchical linear model;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6920-14-87

 received in 2013-08-06, accepted in 2014-04-11,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundAlthough medical education has developed rapidly in the last decade, and the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) is used as the "gold standard" for admission to medical college in mainland China, there is a lack of literature regarding the influence of NCEE score and other factors on the academic performance of medical students. This study aimed to examine potential predictors of first-year grade point average (GPA) for medical students.MethodsThis study included 1,285 students who matriculated at a first-tier medical university in mainland China in 2011. The precollege motivational attitudes for each matriculate were investigated via questionnaire. A hierarchical linear model was fitted to regress first-year GPA on a 100-point scale on NCEE score and other student-level and major-level characteristics.ResultsNCEE score was a significant predictor of both within-major and between-major variation of first-year GPA for medical students. Majors with higher mean NCEE scores had higher mean GPAs, and higher GPAs were observed among those individuals with higher NCEE scores after controlling for major-level characteristics. First-year GPA differed by certain individual socio-demographic variables. Female students had a 2.44-higher GPA on average than did male students. NCEE repeaters had a 1.55-lower GPA than non-repeaters. First-year GPA was associated negatively with parental income but positively with academic self-concept.ConclusionsNCEE score is an important predictor of the first-year GPA of medical students, but it is not the sole determinant. Individual socio-demographic characteristics and major-level characteristics should be taken into account to understand better and improve the first-year GPA of medical students.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Zhou et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.