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. 2023 Aug 14;15(8):e43476.
doi: 10.7759/cureus.43476. eCollection 2023 Aug.

The Importance of Research Experience With a Scoreless Step 1: A Student Survey at a Community-Based Medical School

Nicholas P Radulovich  1 , Skyler Burke  2 , Nathan J Brown  1 , Brett Jones  3 , James Antongiovanni  3 , Douglas Nanu  3 , John Roll  4
Affiliations

The Importance of Research Experience With a Scoreless Step 1: A Student Survey at a Community-Based Medical School

Nicholas P Radulovich et al. Cureus. .

Abstract

Purpose: As of January 26, 2022, the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USLME) step 1 exam went from a scored test to pass-fail step 1 (PFS1). The authors were interested in surveying medical students at a community-based medical school to observe their perceptions of the importance of student research given this recent change.

Method: A Qualtrics survey was disseminated to medical students (years 1-4) via school emails. Data were analyzed using the Mann-Whitney test to assess Likert scale scores, and narrative comments were grouped as qualitative feedback. Survey dissemination and analysis of data were both conducted at a large community-based medical school.

Results: The survey sampled 104 students categorized into pre-clerkship (PC) and clerkship (CL) years, with a response rate of 33%. A contradiction was found, as indicated by the higher number (p = 0.047) of clerkship students interested in Primary Care/Family medicine residency compared to pre-clerkship students at 41% and 59%, respectively. Whereas participants who indicated they are interested in pursuing a competitive specialty for residency were 51% of pre-clerkship students over 41% of clerkship students (p = 0.047). Additionally, given the assessment change to pass/fail, students did in fact believe that residencies would now view research as a higher assessed component than before (79% pre-clerkship and 72% clerkship). However, a minority of students said that they increased their research efforts (41% and 47%). Most students supported the research opportunity improvements proposed in our survey.

Conclusions: Efforts to make the step 1 exam pass/fail may have alleviated some stress related to performance but may have increased the perception of the importance of other components in a student's residency application. Our survey highlights how medical students at a community-based medical school perceive this change and how it has affected their research efforts.

Keywords: community-based medical school; medical research; medical student perspective; residency application; usmle step 1.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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