Abstract:

In the 2011-2012 period, somewhat more than 1600 students were accepted to study Medicine at the UNAM. More than half of them came from the National Preparatory School and from the College of Sciences and Humanities (CCH, for its initials in Spanish), both belonging to the same UNAM and who have an automatic pass to UNAM; the remainder students came from schools incorporated to the UNAM, SEP (Ministry of Education), the CCH or from other regions of Mexico. All these students have to pass a special examination in order to be accepted at the UNAM. Once the total enrollment was known, an examination on general knowledge was performed in Biochemistry. According to their results, students with the highest scores were the first to be able to choose one of the 30 groups, whereas those with the lowest scores were distributed in the remining spaces. The present study was performed to compare the results of the students in the diagnostic examination with their final score in the subject of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The study was cross-sectional, retrospective, observational and comparative. Data processed were from 1056 students, since the inclusion criterion established that the student had to have presented both examinations. Methodology used was through a simple linear regression and Student’s t test for paired samples.
Results indicated a 0.58 correlation between both examinations; when results were contrasted there was a difference between both types of examinations according to the origin of the preparatory school; those with the lowest scores in the diagnostic evaluation were those coming from the CCH in contrast to those with the best yields corresponding to preparatory schools incorporated to the UNAM (i.e., private schools).
We conclude that there is a lack of homogenization among the grading scores of the different preparatory schools, as well as among the groups at the School of Medicine. Therefore, it is suggested to assign the students randomly to a group to increase the homogeneity between both evaluations

Keywords:

Evaluation in biochemistry, Biochemistry students.