Effect of class attendance of medical students' tests performance

Objectives: to study the effect of class attendance of medical students on performance in tests. study design: descriptive cross-sectional study. place of study: lahore medical & dental college (lmdc),lahore. duration of study: two weeks in january,2012 material and method: secondary data was obtained from the end of session yearly record on attendance and test scores in the subject of community medicine study population: all 72,4th year mbbs students variables: age,gender,class attendance & test scores were taken. data was entered and cleaned in spss 19 statistical package. data was presented in the form of tables and graphs. statistics used: descriptive statistics was used in the forms of numbers and percentages. data was further analyzed using pearson correlation and chi square tests of significance (x2). the p value ≤0.05 was used as the cut off point for statistical significance. results: the present study was conducted with 4th year mbbs students,among whom 39(54%) were males and 33(46%) were females. all students were between the age group of 22-24 year. the class attendances of students were grouped into two categories i.e.,<75% and ≥75%,also the test score were grouped into two categories i.e.,< 50% (fail) and ≥50% (pass). gender had a statistically significant bearing on class attendance but it had no effect on test scores. conclusion: there is a statistically significant association between attendance and test scores (p=<0.001).there is a positive correlation between attendance and test scores (r = 0.05). male students had lower attendance (p=0.04) and test scores than the female students.