The Validity of Medical Students’ Scores in their Internship Courses, a Historical Cohort Study

Background and purpose: Internship, undergraduate clerkships, is the last stage of training for medical students in Iran during which they work as medical doctors under supervision of academic staff for 1.5 years. We assessed the validity of students’ scores in internship in one of the paramount medical universities in Iran.Methods: In an historical cohort study, we collected the medical students’ scores in four consecutive cohorts based on their entrance year to the medical school. We checked the validity of these scores and their internal consistencies by computing the Cronbach’s alpha, and also using the discrimination index.Results: The Cronbach’s alpha of scores in the internship courses was lower than that in the other courses (0.72). In addition, the internship courses had the lowest discrimination index. Overall, female and younger students were more successful in their studies.Conclusion: Although internship is one of the most important parts of medical education, it seems that the validity of students’ scores during this phase was lower than that of other courses. These findings necessitate more work to document the predictive validity of internship evaluations bycorrelating them with future clinical performance.