particular incidents in the students' lives and in the outreach programme they were a part of sparked interests and reflections, these incidents should be considered as elements in a continuous reflection of students concerning who they are and where they would like to go rather than critical moments.

No abstract

Recent years have seen leading medical educationalists repeatedly call for a paradigm shift in the way we view, value and use subjectivity in assessment. The argument is that subjective expert raters generally bring desired quality, not just noise, to performance evaluations. While several reviews document the psychometric qualities of the Multiple Mini-Interview (MMI), we currently lack qualitative studies examining what we can learn from MMI raters' subjectivity. The present qualitative study therefore investigates rater subjectivity or taste in MMI selection interview. Taste (Bourdieu 1984) is a practical sense, which makes it possible at a pre-reflective level to apply 'invisible' or 'tacit' categories of perception for distinguishing between good and bad. The study draws on data from explorative in-depth interviews with 12 purposefully selected MMI raters. We find that MMI raters spontaneously applied subjective criteria-their taste-enabling them to assess the candidates' interpersonal attributes and to predict the candidates' potential. In addition, MMI raters seemed to share a taste for certain qualities in the candidates (e.g. reflectivity, resilience, empathy, contact, alikeness, 'the good colleague'); hence, taste may be the result of an ongoing enculturation in medical education and healthcare systems. This study suggests that taste is an inevitable condition in the assessment of students' performance. The MMI set-up should therefore make room for MMI raters' taste and their connoisseurship, i.e. their ability to taste, to improve the quality of their assessment of medical school candidates.

No abstract

Admission interviews in higher education may be developed with the intention to select applicants with specific personal competences not captured by traditional grade-based admission. In this study, we examined whether the data structure of multiple-mini admission interview scores supported the presence of communication, empathy, collaboration, and resilience as independent test dimensions. In addition, the associations between the interview scores and unintended test constructs (station format, pre-university grades, age, gender) were examined. Confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses and regression analyses were used to examine interview data from a cohort of Danish medical school applicants. The proposed multi-dimensionality was not supported by the data structure. The influence of the unintended constructs examined was limited or non-existing. These results are in line with the scarce existing literature. This situation makes a priori claims that the multiple-mini interview can measure multi-dimensional personal competences inadvisable, and care should be taken about what is communicated to stakeholders.