119 - Do Medical Students Shift Effort Away from the Anatomy Laboratory Course in a Hybrid Pass/fail Grading System?

Poster Board Number: 119
There are separate poster presentation times for odd and even posters.
Odd poster #s – first hour
Even poster #s – second hour

Abstract Body : Over the last decades, medical education has trended away from tiered grading systems (e.g. A/B/C/D/F or Honors/Pass/Fail [H/P/F]) towards simple Pass/Fail (P/F) systems. This transition has been thought to benefit student well-being, satisfaction, and time allocation to personal development, while not detrimentally affecting performance. However, the way this is implemented creates potential opportunities for students to shift focus from one course to another, depending on how the importance of the course is perceived or graded. The Anatomy Laboratory (AL) course at the NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine is one component of the full fall coursework (termed FOM). Prior to 2017, performance in the AL was combined with other coursework into an overall FOM grade, which was graded on an H/P/F system. Beginning in 2017, the AL became a standalone component of the fall curriculum and was graded as a separate P/F course, while the non-AL coursework continued to be graded on an H/P/F system. This created a situation where high-performing students could shift effort away from the AL, in order to focus on coursework that contributed to a more desirable ‘Honors’ designation.

Here, we used student performance data from AL and non-AL coursework from 2016–2021 to investigate whether top-performing students indeed engaged in such an effort-shifting strategy. All performance data was Z-standardized among exams and course year. We predicted that if this occurred, for high-performing students, final AL exam scores would drop while final exam scores for non-AL coursework would improve. However, we did not find strong evidence for this trend. In general, performance on final AL exams by high-performing students dropped (5 of 6 years), and on final non-AL exams performance dropped for 3 of 6 years. For 2 of 6 years, performance on non-AL exams essentially remained similar to initial exam performance. Contrary to expectations, for no year was there a significant negative correlation between improvement on the final AL exam and final non-AL exam, neither for the class as a whole (R = 0.05–0.25) nor for top performing students (R = 0.03–0.22). Together, our results show little evidence that students shift their focus away from AL coursework simply because it does not contribute to an Honors designation. Thus, the potential to shift effort between differentially weighted P/F coursework does not appear to actually affect student outcomes.