Academic Failure and its Underlying Factors in Medical Students of Urmia University of Medical Sciences

Academic failure in students of Medicine is one of the important educational issues that deserve serious attempts for the identification of its underlying factors and resolving. This study was designed to find the rate of academic failure and its underlying causes in Medical students of Urmia University of Medical Science. In this descriptive cross-sectional study, demographic and academic information of all students of Medicine in clinical setting who had been accepted in Urmia University of Medical Sciences in the academic years of 1999-2001 were collected from their academic files. Data were analyzed through SPSS and using Chi-square and t-tests. Statistical significant level was considered 0.05. A total of 176 academic files belonged to the entrant students in 2000 (n=71), 2001 (n=48) and 2002 (n=55) were studied. The rate of academic failure was 22.3% in basic sciences period, 0.7% in pre-internship period and 26.5% in internship period. Failure rate in pre-external examination was 11.56% and in pre-internal examination it was 5.6%. Academic failure showed significant relationship with class non-attendance (p<0.05) and the gap between high school graduation and university entrance (p<0.05). Since approximately half of the students experience at least one failure course, it is necessary to pay attention to the causes of this problem in order to improve the quality of educational programs