Charles Maxfield, MD, professor of radiology and pediatrics at Duke, tells how prestigious medical schools routinely tip the scales in their favor to ensure desirable placements in radiology residency programs.
Who benefits and who pays the price when top-ranked medical schools withhold comparative student data from radiology residency program directors? Radiology researchers at Duke recently documented the commonness of the problematic practice.
In this video interview, the study’s lead author, Charles Maxfield, MD, fleshes out some telling details and discusses what can be done to head off underinformed—and thus potentially poor—residency matches.
(Don’t look now, but Match Day 2023 is Friday, March 17.)
To be sure, the problem has other roots as well. Historically, residency program directors had Step 1 of the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) to guide their interview decisions. They lost this step’s most helpful feature, numeric scores, in January of 2022. That’s when graduates began receiving only a pass/fail score.
The jettisoned three-digit scoring system “made it easy for us to compare medical students from different schools,” Maxfield explains in the interview.
However, this does not entirely let those top medical schools—“top” going by the rankings presented annually by US News & World Report—off the hook.
Maxfield says he and his study co-authors were surprised to find not a single top-10 school forthcoming with comparative data, such as graduates’ rank within their class.
Instead, these high-profile institutions seem to be routinely banking on their brand alone to ensure desirable residency placements for their students.
The omittance might not have been so striking had not Maxfield and co-researchers found lower-ranked schools disclosing their students’ full academic records without hesitation.
But wait. Isn’t Maxfield’s own work home, the School of Medicine at Duke University, a perennial top 10 finisher?
Maxfield responds that he and co-authors of the study, published Jan. 18 in JACR, did not intend their interpretation of the findings as “an indictment of elite medical schools. I think they would tell you that they’re acting in their best interest.”
More to the point, he adds, “What we’ve observed over time is a general trend toward less and less transparency of grades and performance metrics globally, by all schools. And I think that’s a shame.”
Click the play button for the rest of the interview.
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.