Medical students await placement results for their Foundation Year

Medical students to be informed of their Foundation Year placement on 8 March

Following a national request to all UK medical schools, the Faculty of Medicine has been assisting the Medical Schools Council (MSC) with a cross check of one part of the results used in a process to place medics for their Foundation year of employment. The Foundation year, which takes place immediately after graduation, involves supervised clinical work to demonstrate that medicine graduates have acquired the skills needed for full registration with the GMC.

The move to retract the results of a Situational Judgement Test (SJT) because of an error in the electronic scoring has left more than 7,000 final-year medics across the country uncertain about where they will be placed after graduation, having been initially informed of their placement early last week. The possibility of errors in the scoring was raised by the College’s Faculty of Medicine after it, along with other medical schools, noticed a number of anomalous results. 

A further manual process has confirmed that the recorded answers of 4.3% of individual applicants were affected by errors in the scanning of the multiple choice test sheets. Imperial students are now waiting, along with their peers around the country, for confirmation of the marks awarded. Students will be informed of the revised SJT scores and their Foundation year allocations by Friday 8 March.

Professor Jenny Higham, Deputy Principal and Director of Education in the Faculty of Medicine, commented that “While I acknowledge that the UK Foundation Programme Office has responded rapidly to the medical school’s concerns, I am of course massively disappointed by what has happened. Imperial College Medical School is determined to support each and every one of its students. The levels of stress and uncertainty of the current situation are most unwelcome for our students, especially as they are preparing for their final examinations in the next couple of weeks, but I would also encourage students to remember that the most important thing is to qualify and to do so as well as possible.”