Selection of medical students with emphasis on interpersonal intervention potential

The process of selection of medical students who were chosen with regard to criteria that have often been used successfully to select mental health interventionists was examined. Selection interview ratings emphasizing personal characteristics were found to have some limited predictive ability to person‐oriented clinical performance in medical clerkships. Premedical grades and entrance examination scores were found to be unrelated to clinical performance despite the wide scoring range on these academic criteria among accepted candidates. Faculty ratings of students on characteristics similar to those utilized in the selection interview were found to be moderately to highly correlated to clinical performance. It was argued that the results suggest a process conclusion that a set of identifiable helping characteristics exist, can be judged, and relate to students' clinical performance in an interpersonally oriented medical program, but that the interview process may be too superficial to assess reliably these personal qualities. It was alternatively suggested that the restricted range of interview ratings among candidates accepted for study may have limited the magnitude of these correlations that were consistently in the predicted direction.