No abstract

This programme, well-received by students and faculty, appeared to help the students not only in improving their empirical skills in observation, but also in developing increased awareness of emotional and character expression in the human face.

As the teaching activities of medical school faculty are given greater emphasis, medical schools must find a way to recognize and reward excellence in teaching. In order to properly evaluate teaching, the authors developed an instrument for measuring the various teaching activities of their faculty. The Relative Value Scale in Teaching weights all teaching activities according to labor intensity, preparation time, level of responsibility, and educational value. The scale quantifies levels of teaching and allows comparison among diverse teaching activities. This complements qualitative measures of teaching and can enhance participation in educational programs as well as recognition of educators.

Standard ED-2 of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) requires medical schools to specify the types of patients that students should encounter, the student's level of responsibility, and the appropriate setting for the encounter. The authors describe the process at Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City for meeting this standard through the development of a Web-based case log. The log permits the medical college to specify expectations for patient encounters and allows the students to record their encounters in an efficient, brief, and user-friendly manner. By downloading the student's reports directly into a database, the medical college can track successes and deficiencies in the student's clinical experiences. However, in response to a questionnaire administered in 2005, students generally expressed dissatisfaction with the case logs, which they described as intrusive busywork.

Our findings suggest that efforts to increase the diversity of medical school student bodies may be complicated by a desire to maintain high average GPA and MCAT scores. We propose that U.S. News revise its ranking methodology by incorporating a new diversity score into its student selectivity score and by reducing the weight placed on GPA and MCAT scores.