The impact of interviewer characteristics on residency candidate scores in Emergency Medicine: a brief report [version 2; peer review: 1 approved, 2 approved with reservations]

Background At the conclusion of residency candidate interview days, faculty interviewers commonly meet as a group to reach conclusions about candidate evaluations based on shared information. These conclusions ultimately translate into rank list position for The Residency Match. The primary objective is to determine if the post-interview discussion influences the final scores assigned by each interviewer, and to investigate whether interviewer characteristics are significantly associated with the likelihood of changing their score. Based on Foucault’s ‘theory of discourse’ and Bourdieu’s ‘social capital theory,’ we hypothesized that interviewer characteristics, and the discourse itself, would contribute to score changes after a post-interview discussion regarding emergency medicine residency candidates. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional observational study of candidate scores for all candidates to a four-year emergency medicine residency program affiliated with Yale University School of Medicine during a single application cycle. The magnitude and direction of score changes, if any, after group discussion were plotted and grouped by interviewer academic rank. We created a logistic regression model to determine the odds that candidate scores changed from pre- and post-discussion ratings related to specific interviewer factors. Results A total of 24 interviewers and 211 candidates created 471 unique interviewer-candidate scoring interactions, with 216 (45.8%) changing post-discussion. All interviewers ranked junior to professor were significantly more likely to change their score compared to professors. Interviewers who were women had significantly lower odds of changing their individual scores following group discussion (p=0.020; OR 0.49, 95% CI 0.26-0.89). Conclusions Interviewers with lower academic rank had higher odds of changing their post-discussion scores of residency candidates compared to professors. Future work is needed to further characterize the influencing factors and could help create more equitable decision processes during the residency candidate ranking process.