Factors such as age, gender, marital status, interest and motivation to enter medical school, learning resources, study time and the transportation used have been shown to significantly affect medical student's cumulative GPA as a whole batch as well as when they are tested for gender.

Results demonstrate that feedback on students' clinical performance is often not forthcoming and when offered it is deficient and fails to concentrate on the development of different clinical skills. This highlights the critical challenges that need to be addressed by teachers, medical education unit and all hospital departments in order to enhance giving effective and structured feedback to medical students during clerkships. Results also raise the extreme need for the establishment and enhancement of a culture that supports feedback among all levels of clinical supervisors.

Objective Structured Practical Examination (OSPE) is widely used in the assessment for medical students' practical skills. OSPE was introduced to the Faculty of Medicine of King Fahad Medical City in September 2008. The aim of this study is to investigate the medical students' feedback on OSPE. Third year female medical students (n=38) enrolled in Respiratory, Gastrointestinal, Urogenital systems blocks were included. A questionnaire was distributed to assess students' evaluation of the OSPE. Grades of the students in these exams were also evaluated. The results of this study showed that, OSPE has been accepted by most of the students as a fair, reliable, effective and useful assessment tool. 63.2% of the students felt stressed during OSPE of Respiratory block and 57.9% reported the need of more time at the stations of this block. There was statistical difference between the grades of each of the Respiratory and Urogenital systems versus the Gastrointestinal system blocks (p=.001). However, the statistical difference between the grades of the Respiratory and Urogenital system blocks was with p value =0.01. In conclusion: students viewed OSPE as a useful assessment tool and they offered a constructive feedback which will be used for further development, improvement and standardization of OSPE.

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Introduction: Sufficient knowledge of anatomy is crucial for safe and efficient clinical practice. The majority of students in the traditional, non-problem based learning curricula found anatomy taught to them in the preclinical phase irrelevant to their clinical practice. Aim: This is a cross-sectional study aiming to investigate senior medical students' perception on anatomy taught in our hybrid problem based learning curriculum, and to measure anatomy knowledge retention during clerkship. Methods: A self-administered questionnaire and 10 validated multiple choice questions were used. 131 students from the 5 th year and 6 th years were included. Results: Around half of the students in each cohort appreciate the importance of knowing detailed contents of anatomy subject for the effective treatment of most medical problems. Two thirds believe that knowledge of anatomy is the most important to be a good physician, and its application to clinical practice should be reinforced early in medical education. However, two thirds have reported that anatomy knowledge fades away by the time they reach the clinical phase. This was supported by the results of the anatomy exam questions where the mean of the grades was 3.81 and 3.15 out of 10 among the 5 th year and 6 th years respectively. There was no significant difference between the two cohorts (P > 0.05), however, grades of female students were significantly higher (P < 0.05). Conclusion: Senior medical students appreciate the importance and relevance of anatomy knowledge received in our hybrid problem based learning curriculum to their clinical practice. However, there is considerable loss in anatomy knowledge during clerkship. We recommend vertical integration of anatomy from the first year through the clerkship and into specialist training, to improve clinically relevant anatomical knowledge retention. Tailored anatomy courses which are relevant to different specialities, could be conducted during clerkship to enhance more integration between basic and clinical fields.