Progress Test: medical student absenteeism is suggestive of poor academic performance

Abstract

Abstract: Introduction: It is not known whether the absence of medical students at the Progress Test (PT) is random event or if it due to some systematic characteristic of the students, which could influence the representativeness of the results obtained by the participants. Objectives: 1) to compare the academic performance indexes, in UFSC Medical School, of students who were present and absent from the PT in 2019; 2) to propose a way to estimate, based on these indexes, what the absentee’s grades would be if they had participated in the PT; 3) to identify factors associated with absence from the PT. Method: The averages of academic performance indexes, overall and in the different phases (semesters) in the groups of students who were present and absent from the PT, were compared using Student’s t test for independent samples. Using a linear regression technique, the probable PT scores were assigned to the group of absent students. Results: The global averages of the three academic indicators were significantly lower in students absent from the PT (p ranging from < 0.03 to < 0.0001); in 10 of the 11 analyzed course phases (semesters), the academic indicators of absentees were worse than those present at the test. The attribution of PT grades to the absentees allowed us to verify that there is a correlation (R=0.62) between the percentage of these students and the difference in grades between the groups that took and those that did not take the PT. Among male students, 25.8% did not attend the PT, while among female students the number of absentees was 16.6% (difference with p <0.01). Conclusions: The absence of students at the PT does not occur randomly. Among the absentees, there is a systematic tendency to have students with worse academic performance. The use of multiple imputation of data demonstrate a correlation between the percentage of absentees and the difference in the average of grades in the PT of this group, compared to the average of the participants’ grades. The proportion of male students who missed the PT was significantly higher than that of female students.