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It’s time to figure out the answer to the question: what are the best medical schools in the Philippines by 2017? Naturally, we should start by discussing how we determine “the best”.
The Criteria: What Makes “The Best” The Best?
So how do we tell which are the best medical schools in the Philippines? The standards vary. This is why you will see a fair number of lists of this type with differing entries on the Web: different people tend to use different criteria.
Let us have an example.
Say that our chief indicator of quality is a school’s most recent performance in the physician licensure exam.
To narrow it down even more, let us say we want only schools whose passing rates for all their examinees have been highest this year (more specifically, for the March 2017 exam).
Under this standard, these could be the top 10 medical schools in the country, then:
These are all excellent schools, so as standards and lists go, these were not bad choices.
Yet there is an obvious objection: it makes little sense to draw the top 10 from the results of a single exam period.
For instance, Saint Luke’s College of Medicine had only 2 examinees for this set of data. Since 1 passed and the other failed, the school would only have a passing rate of 50%. Not very attractive compared to some other passing rates here… and yet hugely misleading.
Saint Luke’s is widely acknowledged one of the best medical schools in the country. It regularly places among the top-represented schools in the exam’s passers.
In fact, last year (specifically, the September 2016 exam), Saint Luke’s was one of the top-performing schools. It had far more exam-takers too at 75. Along with Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (another school not making the March 2017 list above), it had a 100% passing rate.
Now to further extend the example, let us say we want to consider schools based only on their first-timer passing rates, i.e. the passing rates for examinees taking the exam for the first time.
That would knock out Ateneo de Manila’s School of Medicine from the list. Why? Simply since it had no first-timers taking the exam here.
Again, the resulting list could be argued misleading. Most will allow Ateneo’s School of Medicine to be one of the best in the field nowadays. It is a relatively young medical school, true, but its record of first-timer passing rates since establishment surely says something: 98.39% in 2012, 100% in 2013, 98.15% in 2014, 99.13% in 2015, and 95.08% in 2016.
So let us change the criteria.
What if we considered it based on which schools have had the most passers scoring in the top 10 of the year’s examinees, then?
Assuming we were to limit our inquiry to the exam results from the past decade, you would get a slightly different list again:
| School | Number of top 10 passers |
|---|---|
| UST | 39 |
| UP Manila | 38 |
| Cebu Institute of Medicine | 8 |
| UERMMMC | 7 |
| DLSU HSI | 7 |
| Our Lady of Fatima University Valenzuela | 6 |
| FEU NRMF | 5 |
| West Visayas State University La Paz | 4 |
| AdMU SMPH Pasig | 4 |
| Saint Luke's College of Medicine | 3 |
Another objection: some might argue this new criterion a bit unfair. For instance, UST usually sends the most examinees to the licensure exam each year. From August 2015 to March 2017, for instance, it sent 905 test-takers to the exams.
The only school in the same list to come close to that figure was FEU at 643 examinees. One school in the list (Ateneo’s medical school) did not even begin sending examinees until 2012, being a new institution.
Compared to that, one might say UST naturally had better chances of getting into the Top 10 Passers List each year from 2007-2017. In fact, any school that sends more examinees than the others to the exam would have better chances, numerically speaking.
So how should we determine a school’s inclusion? A more reasonable way to do this, perhaps (at least, if we are still putting this much stock into the licensure exam’s results), is to inspect schools’ performances over a period of time.
One such list that follows this standard came up with a fair roster of candidates for the best medical school in the country (based on first-time test-taker passing rates), and we represent it here.
The Top 10 List of the Best Med. Schools (in the Past 3 Years) in the Country
These could be some of the best Philippine medical schools right now.
In addition to these, though, we feel compelled to mention FEU. This is because it was actually the top-performing school in the licensure exams this year (under a standard where only schools with at least 50 examinees and first-timer passing rates over 80% for that year are considered).
FEUNRMF actually placed at #14 in the 2015-2017 list above too, so its performance is fairly consistent. With a first-timer passing rate of 88.20% this year and a first-timer passing rate of 91% over the 2015-2017 stretch, it is definitely a school to consider.
Finally, another school worthy of being appended to the list this year is Our Lady of Fatima University – Valenzuela. It had the most examinees in the top 10 passers for 2017: 3 of them, to be exact.
All this having been said, there is still that objection to be acknowledged: school performance in the licensure exam is hardly the be-all and end-all of medical study.
There are perhaps other, just-as-salient indicators of the quality of medical education schools can supply. They may not always be as easily quantified or even compared. That does not mean they matter less.
What do you think? How should medical schools be evaluated in ranked lists like these? What should determine a school’s “grade” in quality?
Or is there a school that you feel deserves to be in the list for a particular reason? A school that should be ranked higher than the others?
Let us know below or on Twitter / Facebook. You can also click on the images of the school rankings above and share how your school did with others on social media. It helps to get discussions like these rolling! You just might help a future doctor figure out which school is right for her/him.
Edit: The table of schools with the most entries in the PLE’s Top 10 from 2007-2017 has been amended for the correct data. The previous set mistakenly used data from a different exam for one of the years, which resulted in incorrect figures for schools like AdMU SMPH Pasig and UST.
How come Ateneo de Zamboanga University School of Medicine was mot included in the list?they also have passers who were in the top 10 in the last decade i think more than 2…
Probably you should also rank schools by their retention of their doctors in the country….and not lose them all to brain drain…..
Hi JP and thanks for commenting 🙂 I checked and only found 1 from AdZU in the time period, actually. Do you have any sources that can verify that? I did make a mistake with the AdMU & UST numbers, though, as I used the wrong licensure exam results for one of the years. The new table should reflect the corrections.
Your proposed criterion certainly makes a lot of sense, by the way. It’s too bad there’s not a lot of data on it right now.
maybe we can also rank them based on what happened to their graduates. are they all practicing? have they been sucessful with their practice?
Thanks for commenting, Sheila 🙂 Yes, that’s a good idea — although if you don’t mind my asking, how would you quantify success at a doctor’s practice?
I can think of a couple of things
1. Still practising for starters – I know a few graduates who do not use their degree
2. Completion of internship
3. Acceptance into a residency programme
4. Completion of a residency programme
5. Serving in the public sector/private sector (this isn’t a measure of success, just something that would be interesting to know)
There should be a destination survey by the PRC to find out what becomes of medical grads. It would be interesting to know how many of these grads go on to practice medicine.
Thanks for the precise suggestions, KT 🙂 Re:#1 in your list and a PRC survey, it would be interesting to see if particular schools have higher/lower practising rates among their graduates.
The surveys would have to be done over an extended period and the most we could ever get would just be rough correlations, of course. Still, it’s definitely information worth seeing.
As much as medical school licensure performance doesn’t translate always in producing quality and excellent doctors, this is the closest objective criterion which can predict how well an institution fared over the others.
And as much as we always want to have all ‘the bests’ life has to offer, be reminded that most of the time ‘the best’ is relative to an individual. The institution won’t define anyone’s success, it is defined by how the individual has maximized his potentials and learning experiences in the institution where he/she belongs.
To the future doctors, the road is muddy and full of thorns, you have been warned. Yet, you will push through, coz you love mud and thorns so much?
That’s all very true… and wise. Thanks for sharing that advice with us, Eduardo. I’m sure the newer doctors reading the blog appreciate your good sense as much as I do.
Unfortunately the best tangible criterion that we can compare these schools is through the licensure exams, just like assessing a student’s ability to learn is measured with graded tests, objective or subjective. Other parameters may be very hard to quantify or asses. Will we measure success in practice in terms of monetary standing, number of patients, level of specialty, etc. Very time consuming and Doctors might not be willing to give oit those informations.
True, any alternative measurement of med. school excellence will have to be evaluated repeatedly and its benchmarks questioned… just like some already question the present one, actually 🙂 I’m glad you mentioned the potential privacy issue, though. It’s certainly something to consider, so thanks for reminding us of it, Manuel 🙂
There’s quite bias and inaccuracy in ranking St. Luke’s at the top with 99% passing rate. Whereas it was mentioned earlier that St. Luke’s sent 2 examinees to the March 2017 board and 1 failed, how come then that the passing rate is 100%? Likewise, take note that the bulk of first time examinees take the September board and most repeaters take the March board. However, Fatima screens their graduates to take only the March board, it makes sense.
Hi, AC 🙂 To be clear, we’re not saying these are the “absolute best” medical schools in the country. That chart is merely a representation of another possible answer to the question of which institutions those would be. If you follow the link introducing that list in the post, you also see that it’s based on first-timer passing rates. This is the standard the PRC itself uses when evaluating school performance in the examinations.
Hence the seeming disparity: one of the test-takers from St. Luke’s was repeater.
I put a note about that list being limited to first-timer passing rates though, to prevent future misunderstanding. Thanks for pointing it out as well as that intriguing bit of info on Fatima.
Don’t you think its trickier or rather more precarious to field more examinees? Although as you mentioned there is greater possibility for them to get a lot of top ten slots (UST), there is also a greater possibility for them NOT to get a higher passing percentage (9/10 as opposed to 250/300 but based on number passers 250 is significantly higher than 9, and to maintain a “relatively high passed/total examinees percentage speaks of the quality of graduates each institution has)
Very true — it’s one of the weaknesses of this rating approach 🙂 For some reason, it puts to my mind something Meryl Streep once said. People make so much of her being the most nominated actress in history, she quipped, that they tend to forget she’s also the one who has lost the most awards (as with UST, you enter more, you risk more). Yet no one ever interprets those losses as diminutions of her acting’s quality.
Maybe we can look at attrition rates.
Which med schools take care of their students, ie. Provide better teacher to student ratio, or better chances that once you get in, you graduate…
Then compare it to tangible results like what you’ve done above.
Big schools have big population of students, that’s an advantage and a disadvantage in itself.
And i think schools maintaining smaller population is their way of making that school the best med school as compared to others.
Great ideas! I’m especially glad that someone mentioned a benchmark related to the process itself (of educating/creating new doctors). Thanks for the comment, JR 🙂
Since you seem to avow that large-population and small-population schools both have their good sides, though, which one would you personally prefer were you a med student, out of curiosity? Why?
The school plays a critical role but really it is the doctors’ ultimate performance both in the licensure exams and in the real world that will determine which school is the best; for we carry our school’s name and identity with each and every patient we take care of. They may not always ask “what school did you graduate from , doc?”, but each time they say ” thank you doc, for taking good care of me” you feel a sense of pride for your school. That may not be easy to quantify for survey purposes but then again no one had been promised a rose garden either.
That’s a lovely bit of insight, Howell. It’s true, numbers fall short when it comes to capturing things like that. Thank you for sharing this with us 🙂