COGNITIVE AND NON-COGNITIVE CHARACTERISTICS PREDICTING ACADEMIC SUCCESS AMONG MEDICAL STUDENTS

Introduction: Medical undergraduates need to possess the ability to acquire knowledge on a wide range of subjects over short period of time. Medical schools worldwide use different methodologies to select ideal candidates, which include cognitive factors and non-cognitive factors. A proper selection will minimize failures during the beginning semesters and will ensure student’s capacity to withstand the standard of training. Therefore, we have decided to study the impact of cognitive and non-cognitive factors in predicting the academic success among medical students. Material & Methods: The study was a survey of 150 first year medical students of Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College (JNMC), Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Aligarh, admitted in 2018. A data was collected from the Department of Anatomy for initial three part completion tests performance and class attendance, which was tabulated along with the information received from the questionnaire i.e. age, gender, percent secured and language in school, National eligibility cum entrance test (NEET) attempt and marks, residence, category for premedical (PMT) selection (general/ non-resident Indians (NRIs)/ handicap), parents occupation, siblings, family (nuclear/joint/rural/urban), hobbies, time management during PC (part completion) tests, coaching before PMT) given to each student separately. Observation & Results: Students were observed to lie in three groups according to their performance in PC tests: group I (>60%), group II (50-59.9%), group III (<50%). All the cognitive and non-cognitive factors were compared. Conclusion: Both cognitive and non-cognitive factors play an important role in the outcome of a medical student. Factors positively influencing the performance of a selected candidate in medical schools cannot be simply based on previous academic performance.