Abstract

Correlation of attendance with grades in students of ayub medical college abbottabad, Pakistan

Author(s): Dr. Syed Yar Muhammad Shah, Dr. Khalid Shahzad, Dr. Abdul Mohaimin Muhammad, Dr. Anum Ashfaq, Dr. Hayida Ali, Dr. Hina Sadiq, Dr. Chanda Bilal, Dr. Faizan Banaras

Background: A student’s commitment to medical education is evaluated by their interest shown in attending classes. Medical education demands high attendance for good command and understanding over the subject, and a better understanding of a subject in the field of medicine provides a basis for professionalism, this sets attendance and performance in a position to be investigated if they are correlated, In this study we opted to test this correlation in undergraduate medical students.

Objectives: To find out if there is any correlation (positive, negative or none) between a student’s attendance in class and annual examination performance.

Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed in Ayub medical college on students of MBBS from second to final year over a period of 6 months (December 2018 to June 2019). Sample size was composed of a total 296 students (189 males and 107 females) and data was collected using stratified simple random sampling. Questionnaires were distributed among the students and attendances of each student in each subject were confirmed from the Student Affairs Section. The data was analyzed using SPSS 16.0.

Results: Annual performances of each student showed that grades were weakly impacted by annual college attendance (r=0.284, pvalue=0.000) which is statistically significant.

Conclusions: Our research found out a weakly positive correlation between attendance and grades, however slightly different in case of gender, also a student’s learning preferability and experience at college have an effect on students annual performance Further research is needed to understand whether the relationship is causal, and whether improving attendance rates can improve academic performance.