Evaluating the educational effectiveness of an 8-week patient management course for surgical interns: A nine-year analysis

Summary for table of contents: The transition from medical school to internship can be challenging for students. This work describes a practically oriented “intern school” to rapidly introduce new surgical interns to common problems they will encounter and initial management steps. We hypothesized that poor performance in “intern school” would predict poor performance on the American Board of Surgery In-Training Exam scores (ABSITE), potentially allowing earlier educational intervention. While knowledge improved with focused teaching, neither overall performance on intern school pre/post tests nor degree of improvement correlated with ABSITE performance.