News Release

Medical schools must not accept dishonest behaviour among students

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BMJ

Are "tomorrow's doctors" honest? Questionnaire study exploring medical students' attitudes and reported behaviour on academic misconduct

Cheating at medical school [Editorial]

Academic misconduct does exist amongst medical students and needs to be taken seriously by medical schools, finds a study in this week's BMJ.

An anonymous questionnaire was completed by 461 students in all years at Dundee University medical school. The questionnaire had 14 scenarios in which a fictitious student, "John," engaged in dishonest behaviour. For each scenario, students were asked whether they felt John was wrong and whether they had done or would consider doing the same.

Most students felt that most of the scenarios were wrong. However, the proportion of students reporting that they had engaged in or would consider engaging in the scenarios varied from 2% for copying answers in a clinical examination to 56% for copying directly from published text and only listing it as a reference. About a third of students reported that they had engaged in or would consider engaging in behaviour described in four of the scenarios: exchanging information about an examination, writing "nervous system examination normal" when this hadn't been performed, lending work to others, and copying published text without appropriate referencing.

Some of these findings are worrying, as they suggest that, in some cases, there is no consensus among students on what constitutes unacceptable behaviour, say the authors. Academic misconduct needs to be taken seriously by medical schools as it casts doubt on the validity of qualifications, they conclude.

Medical schools must make their institutional position and their expectations of students absolutely clear from day one, writes Shimon Glick in an accompanying editorial. The future of the medical profession depends on preserving and restoring public trust in doctors, but this trust must be deserved and earned, he concludes.

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Contacts:

[Paper]: Carol Pope, Press Officer, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK Email: c.l.e.pope@dundee.ac.uk

[Editorial]: Shimon Glick, Professor Emeritus, Moshe Prywes Center for Medical Education, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Becr Sheva, Israel Email: Gshimon@bgumail.bgu.ac.il


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