A two-year experience with premedical postbaccalaureate students admitted to medical school.

To determine how well premedical postbaccalaureate students performed in and adjusted to medical school, the author examined the records for all 123 matriculants to the Brown University Program in Medicine in 1987-88 and 1988-89 and sent each student a questionnaire. More than one-third of the first-year students admitted to Brown were from premedical postbaccalaureate programs (that is, they had taken the traditional premedical course requirements after graduating from college). The postbaccalaureate students were older than the rest of their classmates, on average, and were more likely to have been non-science majors in college. Academic performances over the first two years were comparable in the two groups, and there was no significant difference between the groups in their self-reports of adequacy of preparation or involvement in extracurricular activities. The author concludes that, faced with a smaller applicant pool, medical schools may wish to consider premedical postbaccalaureate students as a valuable resource.