BACKGROUND Prior to 1999 students entering our MBBS course were selected on academic performance alone. We have now evaluated the impact on the demographics of subsequent cohorts of our standard entry students (those entering directly from high school) of the addition to the selection process of an aptitude test (UMAT), a highly structured interview and a rural incentive program. METHODS Stud...

BACKGROUND Admission to medical school is one of the most highly competitive entry points in higher education. Considerable investment is made by universities to develop selection processes that aim to identify the most appropriate candidates for their medical programs. This paper explores data from three undergraduate medical schools to offer a critical perspective of predictive validity in me...

This paper presents failure analysis of solder joints with a damage-coupled viscoplastic model. A material model is developed to characterize the elasticity, plasticity, creep and damage of solder. A semiimplicit time-integration approach is adopted for the numerical implementation of the solder model. This solder model has been implemented into nite element codes developed at Sandia National L...

The selection of medical students is an important issue for the community and the medical profession because of the high costs involved in medical education and the need for graduates to be good doctors. Since the 1970s, the method of selecting medical students in Australia has evolved from the use of purely academic criteria based on secondary school matriculation results to the use of intervi...

Although very accurate in representing the material anisotropy, finite element analysis based on direct use of a polycrystal model is CPU-intensive (Guan et al., 2006a). In the present study, this Taylor-type polycrystalline model was firstly used to predict the anisotropy coefficients of Yld96 yield function. Then this phenomenological anisotropic yield function was implemented into ABAQUS/Sta...

This article presents two applications of the nonlinear finite element analysis (FEA) using ABAQUS/Standard with a user developed material subroutine Nitinol UMAT from Abaqus West. The analyses are found to agree well with the theoretical prediction and/or experimental measurement. In that first example, FEA predicts the stress-strain response of a superelastic Nitinol device at different Af te...