Correlation of high school exam grades with study success at a German medical school

Abstract

Ozan Yüksel Tekta�?, Cornelia Fiessler, Andreas Mayr, Winfried Neuhuber, FriedrichPaulsen

To evaluate the association between high school leaving exam grade and achieved grades in the first medical state exam among medicine students in a major southern German medical school. An anonymous questionnaire-based cross sectional examination was performed among all medicine students of the 3rd to 5th year in a major medical school in the German federal state Bavaria. Associations between grades of the high school leaving exam and grades achieved in both written and oral parts of the first medical exam were analyzed using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients. 432 students answered the questionnaire. Spearman’s rank correlation analysis showed that there is only a weak association between high school leaving exam and medical state exam grades. Our finding that high school leaving exam degrees and medical state exam grades are not strongly linked to each other support the trend seen in the past years in Germany that more and more medicine study places are distributed also considering other factors than high school leaving exam degrees