Personality factors in medical and other students 1

Since 1966, we have collected a large amount of information on objective examination scores (Department of Research and Service in Education, 1971) and have information on over 40,000 candidate-assessments and over 13,000 multiple-choice questions. We will soon be able to extend this to types of subjective test data, such as vivas, essays, and clinical assessments. One of the many problems that this poses is that these measures of scholastic ability or attainment may vary not only because of differences in the effectiveness of teaching but also because of non-educational differences between groups of students. It is therefore important to be able to differentiate between groups using non-scholastic factors, in addition to using measures of academic achievement. In order to measure such differentiation we have adapted the 16PF personality profile constructed by Professor R. B. Cattell. This test is particularly suitable for our work: it has already been established by a large amount of research (Cattell, 1965) resulting in published reference data (Cattell, Eber, and Tatsuoka, 1970). The test was originally constructed as a measure of the normal, rather than a clinically derived population, and is therefore, we believe, more relevant to universities than many other tests. Another useful feature of the 16PF test, in common with other questionnaires, is that the raw data which we collect remain available to us for reference, allowing different measurements to be made at a later date from the same data.