Biometrics in the medical school curriculum: making the necessary relevant.

Biometrics has been perceived by freshman medical students as a necessary but not immediately relevant part of their medical training. Because a student is more likely to learn and retain course content if he feels it is relevant, an attempt was made to change the students' perception of the biometrics course by introducing statistical methods as a means of solving some problems in the interpretation of clinical laboratory data. Retrospective analysis of student course evaluations over the last five years indicates that a significant change in student perception of the relevance of the course did occur.