Applying conscientiousness index: a tool to explore medical students’ professionalism in Indonesia

OBJECTIVES This study was aimed to describe lecturers' perspective concerning the suitable Conscientiousness Index (CI) components and implementations, as well as to compare the CI scores in year 1-4 student batches. METHODS Components were formulated from objective measurements based on interviews with 12 faculty members. The components include: attendance, adherence to rules, evaluative feedback submissions, performance in assignments and clinical skills, assignment submissions, volunteerism, accomplishments, and general misconducts. The scores were collected from year 1-4 pre-clinical medical students (N=144) during the first semester of 2014-2015. Final interviews were conducted with 9 faculty members. Quantitative analysis was performed using Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney test. Qualitative analysis was performed using content analysis. RESULTS Using Kruskal-Wallis test, significant difference was found in the CI scores among all years (p=0.000). Post-hoc analysis using Mann-Whitney test showed significant difference in all years except year 1 and 4 (p=0.388). Of the 9 lecturers interviewed during the second interviews, 7 endorsed the importance of CI, while 2 doubted its applicability. CONCLUSIONS Due to the unique characteristics of each block, our system had not been able to conduct a balanced CI evaluation, as compared to the original research. We concluded that the implementation of CI would be highly dependent on the faculty members, with their commitment as the main pre-requisite. We hope to involve academic advisors as CI evaluators and improve our student-centered learning for future assessments. Further study is needed to investigate the longitudinal implementation of CI.