IUHW School of Medicine: overview of the six-year journey of an innovative, international new medical school in Japan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
International University of Health and Welfare (IUHW) School of Medicine opened in April 2017, 38 years after the government ban on the establishment of new medical schools in Japan. This new medical school was founded in order to educate the next generation of physicians who can contribute to the improvement of the health and welfare of the global community. Six years later, IUHW School of Medicine just graduated its first class in March 2023. IUHW School of Medicine distinguished itself from the other 81 medical schools in Japan in many aspects: teaching medicine in English for the first time in Japan, creating an international learning environment by actively welcoming international students and offering rich English and Japanese language programs, providing ample opportunities for students to learn and practice advanced communication skills in both English and in Japanese from the very beginning of medical school, and providing a curriculum that encourages students to become active learners which is a necessary attitude for life-long learning. This new medical school and its curriculum will not truly bear fruit for another 10, maybe 20 years. However, at the time of the graduation of its first class, there are at least 3 objective outcomes for evaluation: the percentage of students passing the Japanese National Medical Licensure Exam, including for the international students most of whom arrived in Japan six years ago with no Japanese language ability; post-Clinical Clerkship OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination) English medical interview exam results evaluated only by external evaluators from the US, Canada, and the UK; and the number of students who passed the USMLE (United States Medical Licensing Examination) board exams. These results indicate that this innovative and ambitious medical education did accomplish its intended results so far. IUHW School of Medicine was able to achieve 99.2% passing rate for the Japanese National Medical Licensure Exam, with a 100% passing rate among international students. Senior students received excellent external evaluations by US, Canadian, and UK clinical educators for their medical interviewing skills in English, which includes not only clinical knowledge and reasoning abilities but also English language and communication skills to build good rapport with patients. So far, 20 students passed the USMLE Step 1 and four students also passed Step 2 (as of June, 2023). The passing rate for both Step 1 and 2 was 100%. Looking at the trajectory of this new school so far, including the fact that the graduates seem to be equipped with active learning skills gained through many small groups and team-based learning during their medical education, we believe that the graduates of IUHW School of Medicine will indeed improve the health and welfare of the global community, especially that of Asia, in the decades to come.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.010 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".