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 5 Correlations in the 1980 Cohort Study

	Mean GCSE/O-level grade	Best three A-levels	First year BMS outcome	Second year BMS outcome	Finals outcome	On Specialist Register
	Continuous censored	Continuous censored	Ordinal	Ordinal	Continuous	Binary
Mean GCSE/O-level grade	1	0.406	0.192	0.209	0.175	-0.022
		P <0.001	P <0.001	P <0.001	P = 0.002	NS
		n = 562	n = 542	n = 528	n = 313	n = 391
Best three A-levels	0.438 ± 0.035 (0.358 to 0.503)	1	0.190	0.249	0.307	0.045
			P <0.001	P <0.001	P <0.001	NS
			n = 562	n = 548	n = 328	n = 403
First year BMS outcome	0.226 ± 0.041 (0.130 to 0.298)	0.235 ± 0.042 (0.150 to 0.318)	1	0.416	0.215	0.005
				P <0.001	P <0.001	NS
				n = 548	n = 329	n = 397
Second year BMS outcome	0.235 ± 0.047 (0.148 to 0.338)	0.293 ± 0.054 (0.174 to 0.379)	0.512 ± 0.038 (0.434 to 0.582)	1	0.359	0.080
					P <0.001	NS
					n = 329	n = 399
Finals outcome (London only)	0.182 ± 0.051 (0.081 to 0.280)	0.323 ± 0.052 (0.229 to 0.426)	0.244 ± 0.064 (0.107 to 0.357)	0.410 ± 0.052 (0.304 to 0.511)	1	0.084
						NS
						n = 261
On Specialist Register	-0.031 ± 0.062 (-0.146 to 0.090)	0.054 ± 0.063 (-0.064 to 0.176)	0.007 ± 0.079 (-0.142 to 0.156)	0.119 ± 0.077 (-0.052 to 0.255)	0.104 ± 0.074 (-0.038 to 0.250)	1

Abbreviations: A-level, Advanced level; BMS, Basic medical sciences; GCSE, General Certificate of Secondary Education; MCMC, Markov Chain Monte Carlo; NS, not significant; O-level, Ordinary level.
^aCorrelations in entrants to medical school between measures of academic and professional attainment attainment in the 1980 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.

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