The Academic Backbone: longitudinal continuities in educational achievement from secondary school and medical school to MRCP(UK) and the specialist register in UK medical students and doctors

Table 4 Correlations in the 1985 Cohort Study ^{a,b,c, d,e}

	Mean GCSE/O-level grade	Best three A-levels	BMS outcome	Finals outcome	On Specialist Register
	Continuous censored	Continuous censored	Ordinal	Continuous	Binary
Mean GCSE/O-level grade	1	0.381	0.214	0.222	0.067
		P <0.001	P <0.001	P <0.001	P = 0.071
		n = 848	n = 843	n = 348	n = 731
Best three A-levels	0.390 ± 0.031 (0.327 to 0.446)	1	0.180	0.240	0.066
			P <0.001	P <0.001	P = 0.075
			n = 848	n = 347	n = 733
BMS outcome	0.242 ± 0.033 (0.184 to 0.314)	0.216 ± 0.037 (0.147 to 0.290)	1	0.350	0.096
				P <0.001	P = 0.009
				n = 361	n = 742
Finals outcome (London only)	0.234 ± 0.046 (0.140 to 0.323)	0.254 ± 0.055) (0.148 to 0.362)	0.411 ± 0.054 (0.282 to 0.508)	1	0.214
					P <0.001
					n = 334
On Specialist Register	0.088 ± 0.045 (0.003 to 0.174)	0.089 ± 0.042 (0.012 to 0.175)	0.129 ± 0.051 (0.030 to 0.226)	0.267 ± 0.062 (0.136 to 0.385)	1

Abbreviations: A-level, Advanced level; BMS, Basic medical sciences; GCSE, General Certificate of Secondary Education; MCMC, Markov Chain Monte Carlo; O-level, Ordinary level.
^aCorrelations in entrants to medical school between measures of academic and professional attainment attainment in the 1985 Cohort study.
^bCorrelations above the diagonal are simple Pearson correlations (for example, point-biserials, φ correlations. where a measure is binary or ordinal), and have different n values for various reasons.
^cCorrelations shown in bold are significant at P<0.05.
^dCorrelations in the lower triangle were calculated taking account of censoring, and for ordinal values are equivalent to tetrachoric/polychoric correlations.
^eValues are mean ± SD (95% CI) unless otherwise stated, and the 95% confidence intervals are the result of the final 2000 MCMC steps in a chain of 5000.

ISSN: 1741-7015