Abstract

Ashfaq Akram*, Muhammad Umar Shah, Rahmatullah Khan and Fadia Butt

ABSTRACT

In most medical schools, selection tools are used to assess the cognitive abilities of the candidates. Trend is growing to use tools meant to evaluate non cognitive skills also. Therefore, a number of psychological and aptitude tests have been emerged. Majority of current tools being used for selection of medical students have verbal reasoning, critical thinking and interview segment. This paper aims to suggest an innovative instrument to assess the effectiveness of a set of personal attributes (such as Hard work, Politeness, Cool minded, Creativeness, Socially well behaved, Problem solving, Good team work, Good communication, Leadership and commitment to the group qualities) denoted as Natural Built in Attributes (NBAs) as a predictor of student performance in an undergraduate medical programme. A new NBAs tool is suggested as template to apply on applicants to the medical programme as well as students within the programme. It is expected that the NBAs are strongly associated with student performance within the medical programme and overall including it in the admission process would likely to improve the effectiveness of the selection process.