Increase in medical students doesn’t lower educational quality? Studies say otherwise.

The government is confident that increasing the medical school enrollment by 2,000 students in 2025 will not compromise the quality of education. However, foreign studies have shown otherwise, an expert said Saturday.

The surge in enrollment has affected professors' teaching methods and lowered academic performance, he added.

Professor Yang Eun-bae of the Department of Medical Education at Yonsei University introduced papers from international journals that studied the impact of increasing medical school students on educational quality at an academic conference organized by the Korea Association of Medical Colleges (KAMC).

Changes in class size had a negative impact on student performance, Professor Yang said, citing the paper “Heterogeneous Class Size Effects: New Evidence from a Panel of University Students,” published in 2010 in The Economic Journal, an international journal published by the Royal Economic Society of the United Kingdom.

The researchers analyzed the impact of class size on student test scores using university administrative records from 2000 to 2004. The analysis involved 10,873 college students. They analyzed the academic performance of students in each class size group: A (less than 20 students), B (20-33 students), C (34-55 students), D (56-103 students), and E (104-211 students).

The results showed that students' test scores dropped dramatically when the class size increased by 10 students from A to B. Performance also declined when the class size increased by 20 students from Group B to Group C. Achievement was low when the class size increased by more than 50 students from D to E. In contrast, in medium-sized classes, from C to D, the change in class size did not significantly impact student performance.

Class size also affected professors. In a 2010 paper, “The Impact of Class Size and Number of Students on Outcomes in Higher Education,” researchers from the University of Richmond School of Business in the U.S. found that teaching many students at once reduces the effectiveness of teaching methods.

They found that large classes and large numbers of students encourage professors to change subject matter in ways that are not beneficial to students. This makes it harder to give individualized attention, leading to poorer learning outcomes.

Increased enrollment in medical schools has also been shown to negatively impact clinical training. In 2008, researchers from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in the U.S. published a study titled “The Impact of Increasing Medical School Class Size on Clinical Clerkships: A National Survey of Internal Medicine Clerkship Directors."

The researchers surveyed clinical clerkship directors at 110 institutions and found that a 30 percent increase in enrollment would require 7.2 additional students per ward and the development of 5.4 additional ward clerkship sites. For outpatient clerkships, the number of students per site would increase by 5.5, requiring the development of an additional 9.1 sites. In the end, they pointed out that the reasons for the increase in medical school enrollment are:

● Lack of space.

● Lack of training hospitals and funding.

● Lack of sufficient patient exposure.

● Lack of mentoring.

● Difficulty in recruiting professors.

The Korean government is set to add 2,000 medical students, a 67 percent increase from 3,058. For the class of 2025, the number of medical students will increase by 1,509 to 4,567.

“As class sizes have increased, students' academic performance has generally declined,” Professor Yang said. “The quality of education decreases as the number of students increases, and the better students are more negatively affected. Increasing class size is associated with decreased learning volume and critical thinking.”