The virtues of the virtual medical school interview

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has mandated the use of virtual interactions in medical school. Although this falls mainly in the area of didactic instruction, of necessity, it has extended to the critical Admissions Process and the Medical School Interview itself. The California University of Science and Medicine (CUSM) with their flipped classroom approach had previously entered a virtual space of instruction even before COVID-19. Because CUSM was, in a sense, already committed to ‘virtual’ education, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, CUSM focused not on what it might lose but what it might gain and what their applicants to medical school might gain with the virtual format. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to initially compare the Virtual Interview with the traditional On-Campus (In-Person) Interview during the hybrid 2020 year when the COVID-19 pandemic began. The Virtual Interview was patterned after the On-Campus Interview with some modifications. The same faculty conducted both interviews. A number of inherent advantages of the Virtual Interview surfaced to these faculty interviewers based on their subjective observations and conclusions. The overall interviewee satisfaction with the Virtual Interview was very positive based on their subjective observations and conclusions. The objective data from the Virtual Interviews compared to the On-Campus Interviews in the hybrid year resulted in a greater percentage of both offers of acceptance (p = .001) and matriculations (p = .001). In order to strengthen our initial observations, we expanded our study to include 2 pre-COVID-19 years (2018, 2019) of exclusively On-Campus interviews (n = 743) and 1 additional COVID-19 year (2021) of exclusively Virtual Interviews (n = 529). In this expanded study, interviewee demographics were not confounding and the Virtual Interview gave rise to overall greater interviewee satisfaction (p = .001), a trend to greater interviewer satisfaction and a greater percentage of both offers of acceptance (p = .047) and matriculations (p = .036).

KEYWORDS:

• Medical school admissions
• medical school interviews
• virtual interviews

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Jason Crowley and Clarissa Barra of CUSM’s Office of Medical Education, CUSM’s Instructional and Informational Technology Services for enabling video conferencing coauthor communications and Louise Borda for providing operational assistance in the creation of this manuscript.

Author titles

A Pete Eveland is Senior Associate Dean of Student Affairs and Admissions. Lissett G. Prado is Executive Assistant to the Associate Dean of Students. Sabrina R. Wilhelm is Director of Academic Skills and Career Advising. Stephanie Wong is a third year medical school student. Sanford H. Barsky is Executive Director of the Cancer Center and Institute for Personalized Medicine. All authors are from the California University of Science and Medicine.

Data availability statement

All raw data, in de-identified format, is available to any interested party upon request. https://cusm.org/school-of-medicine/faculty/profiles/sanford-barsky.php

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they, at the present time, have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. None of the sources of support listed influenced the collection, analysis and interpretation of data, the generation of the hypothesis, the writing of the manuscript or the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Ethical approval

This study was conducted under FERPA guidelines. All data had been collected as part of the routine admissions process. All subjects were de-identified. The present study was approved by CUSM’s IRB (HS-2020-04).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Author contributions

All authors made intellectual contributions to the work and wrote portions of the manuscript. A Pete Eveland originated the design of the Virtual Interview and implemented the process. Lissett G. Prado retrieved and analyzed the data from the added years of 2018, 2019, and 2021 and designed and administered the 2021 questionnaires to the additional virtual applicants. Sabrina R. Wilhelm executed the logistics of both the Virtual Interview as well as the On Campus interview to all CUSM applicants and matriculants and de-identified all subjects. Stephanie Wong conducted statistical analyses of the data blindly. Sanford H Barsky provided input into investigating the overall strengths of the virtual interview as well as offered comparative approaches to the two types of interviews.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the California University of Science and Medicine and the Dr. Carolyn S. Glaubensklee Endowed Cancer Center Directorship.