Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Medical School Admissions in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Importance: Medical schools promote admission pathways as well as diversity and inclusivity to prospective students who are underrepresented in medicine (UIM) primarily via their websites. Research from organizational structures supports the use of instrumental values (which focus on behavior and core beliefs), rather than terminal values (which focus on the end goal), to promote diversity. Objective: To characterize the use of instrumental and terminal values to promote institutional diversity and inclusivity on Canadian medical school websites. Design, Setting, and Participants: This qualitative study analyzed the contents and themes of Canadian medical school websites based on a theoretical value framework and an organizational diversity management framework. A literature review was conducted to explore the use of instrumental and terminal values in promoting diversity and inclusivity, and a codebook was created that outlined the characteristics of these values. The content of all application pathway websites for UIM applicants to all Canadian medical schools was coded between July and August 2022. Main Outcomes and Measures: Use of terminal vs instrumental values across the UIM-targeted admission websites of medical schools. Results: Twenty-two websites for 17 Canadian medical schools were included. Content on most of these websites promoted diversity in response to government policies or public accountability and often supported a dominant culture while treating diversity as an exception. The use of terminal rather than instrumental values was also more prominent on websites that targeted Indigenous prospective students compared with Black prospective students and applicants with lower socioeconomic status (11 [50%] websites vs 5 [23%] and 4 [18%] websites). Instrumental values, although seldom used, promoted diversity as a means to improve health care and training for all students in a program. Conclusions and Relevance: Results of this qualitative study suggested that medical schools in Canada promoted diversity and inclusivity to prospective students primarily as an end goal rather than as a core value. Medical schools should highlight the benefits of diverse lived experiences and reinforce their commitment to diversity and inclusion by aligning their website content with their ongoing work in this area.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".