ArticleBMJ open2023
Is the awarding gap at UK medical schools influenced by ethnicity and medical school attended? A retrospective cohort study.
Article in BMJ open, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The Perpetual Cycle of Racial Bias in Healthcare and Healthcare Education: A Systematic Review.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Pooled it
- The impact of ethnicity information in single best answer questions on student performance, item response time and psychometric properties.Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice · 2026Article
- Competition and equity in NHS specialty training, 2021-2024: longitudinal cohort analysis of protected-characteristic outcomes.Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2026Article
- Teaching at scale: a mixed-methods study of team-based learning analytics to enable early support in medical education.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- Evaluating equity interventions and the limits of institutional change: from admission to clinical leadership in UK medical education.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Review
- Factors influencing ethnic minority medical students' performance in second sit examination.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Article
- Specialty choices among UK medical students: certainty, confidence and key influences-a national survey (FAST Study).BMJ open · 2025Article
- Socioeconomic and demographic predictors of extracurricular achievements among UK medical students (FAST study).BMJ open · 2025Article
- Exploring pre-clinical medical students' perception of and participation in active learning: A mixed-methods transnational study.Medical education · 2025Article
- Differential attainment in UK postgraduate medical examinations: examining the relationship between sociodemographic differences and examination performance.BMC medicine · 2025Article
- Trends in Gender, Ethnicity and Less-Than-Full-Time Training among Reconstructive Plastic Surgery Registrars and Consultants between 2009 and 2020.JPRAS open · 2024Article
- 'BMJ open · 2024Article
- The role of medical schools in UK students' career intentions: findings from the AIMS study.BMC medical education · 2024Article
- Evidence-based appraisal of situational judgement tests (revisited).Clinical medicine (London, England) · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesTo better characterise the Awarding Gap (AG) between black, Asian and other minority ethnic (BAME) and white students in UK undergraduate medical education by examining how it affects eight minority ethnicity subgroups (Bangladeshi, black, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, mixed, other Asian background and other ethnic background) and whether the AG varies by medical school attended.
designRetrospective cohort study.
settingData extracted from the UK Medical Education Database on students enrolled at 33 UK medical schools in the academic years starting 2012, 2013 and 2014.
participants16 020 'Home' tuition fee status students who sat the University Clinical Aptitude Test on entry to university and obtained a UK Foundation Programme (UKFP) application score on exit. PRIMARY OUTCOME MEASURE: UKFP Z-scores on exit from medical school.
resultsThere were significant differences in UKFP Z-scores between ethnicity subgroups. After white students, mixed ethnicity students performed best (coefficient -0.15 standard deviations [SD]) compared with white students, (95% confidence interval [CI] -0.23 to -0.08, p<0.001) and Pakistani students scored lowest (coefficient -0.53 SD, 95% CI -0.60 to -0.46, p<0.001). In pairwise comparisons of scores between all nine individual ethnicity subgroups, 15/36 were statistically significant. The AG varied considerably across medical schools. The largest gap showed the coefficient for BAME was -0.83 SD compared with white students (95% CI -1.18 to -0.49, p<0.001), while the smallest demonstrated no statistically significant difference in performance between BAME and white students (+0.05 SD, 95% CI -0.32 to 0.42, p=0.792).
conclusionsBAME students are significantly disadvantaged by the current UK medical education system. There are clear differences in medical school outcomes between students from different ethnicity subgroups, and the size of the AG also varies by medical school attended. Urgent and effective action must be taken to address the AG and achieve an equal learning environment for our future doctors.
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