Hi, my name is Sydney Brown. I'm an OMIS 3 at William Care University College of Osteopathic Medicine located in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. My project is titled Measuring the Prevalence of Academic Entitlement in Osteopathic Medical Students. First, I want to introduce my team. I'm the principal investigator. The rest of my team is comprised of student Dr. Abigail Rogers and Dr. Danielle Fastring. Going into what our project focused on, there's this concept of academic entitlement, which for our sake we'll call AE. And so in 2009, Chowning and Campbell defined AE as the tendency to hold a certain expectation of academic success without taking personal responsibility. This kind of goes into the weeds of external versus internal locus of control if you're familiar with that concept. And so as AE increases in a student, they're more likely to engage in and out of the classroom less, poorly regulate academic emotion and accept plagiarism to a greater extent. And so this kind of goes against some of our osteopathic principles and the oaths that we took to work together and collaborate and be positive about things. And so it is important to identify medical students early on in their path that have higher levels of AE. That way there's time for early intervention. Otherwise, these students are just going to carry on with unrealistic expectations, negatively impact their peers, and exhibit unprofessionalism in their respected career. And so this project was first done with a pharmacy school and their group of students. And so we were really interested in incorporating that within the osteopathic realm. And so there are two validated academic entitlement instruments out there that we utilized in a survey. And so going into our methods, we first created the survey. It included things like demographic data, academic performance questions, and two validated academic entitlement instruments. And once we had that survey created on Qualtrics, we distributed it to four of the classes at William Carey University, OMS one through four, via Outlook groups. And so once we got as many responses as we could, we went to analyzing the data. The way that we did this is we first reverse coded negatively worded items, and the AE items were summed. And then the association between demographic variables in AE was determined through chi-square analysis, and the association between academic performance in AE was determined by t-test. And so looking further at our results, this first table shows the demographic characteristics of the respondents that we had. And so you can see that we have predominantly female respondents for the age group. Our largest age group was 26 to 40 years old. For graduating class, our largest group was the class of 2027. And then the way our institution works is we have course remediations and reassessments. So reassessments is regarding individual exams, and so students are allowed up to two reassessments in a term or a semester. And so we ask those students in a whole academic year, how many reassessments did you take? And so the options were one, two, three, or more. And this is keeping in mind that they can do up to four in an entire academic year. And we did that for OMS one, two, and three years. Obviously, if a student is a first year student, then they said that it was not applicable that they did reassessments in OMS two and three. So we took that into consideration. And then course remediations means that the student redid an entire course that was in that semester, and we looked at it throughout an entire academic year, very similar to the reassessments. And so we asked the students if they've had to do any course remediation in OMS one, OMS two, or OMS three. And then we calculated the instrument scores. I'll show you the instrument in a second. There's two of them. And that basically told us if that student was entitled or not. And so going down, we also had 145 respondents. And going down to figure two, this is comparing the student characteristics in academic performance of more entitled and less entitled students for the academic entitled instruments A and B. And so in the first column here, you can see the not entitled versus entitled students in the P value. And what I really want you to hone in on is the GPA. So students that had a GPA less than 85 on a 100 point scale were more likely to be academically entitled. For figure three, if you're curious what the two academic instruments look like and what the statements were that the students were agreeing to on a Likert scale, there are external responsibility and internal responsibility type of questions. And so they included things like my professors are obligated to help me prepare for exams, professors are employees who get money for teaching, and so on and so forth. And so students agreed on that on a one to five Likert scale. And we calculated the median responses in the range for each of those. And we did the same thing for instrument B. If a statement was a negative statement, we had to reverse code that. So we took all of those into consideration and calculated the scores. So in conclusion, those with lower academic success were 3.8 times more likely to be classified as entitled. And the p-value for that finding was 0.012. And so all this together, that means osteopathic medical students with low academic achievement will exhibit higher levels of academic entitlement. And so what we encourage is for professors and academic institutions to pay attention to the grades and the traits that can come out of those students when they're not doing so so well with their coursework. And just keep in mind that that can start to impact their relationships with their professors as well as their relationships with their peers. And so the phenomenon that we're seeing correlates with the students harboring those unrealistic expectations within academia adversely affecting their peer dynamics and displaying unprofessional conduct in their medical endeavors. And while we acknowledge the potential for recall bias in the survey, we do urge faculty at osteopathic medical institutions to remain vigilant regarding potential academic entitlement among students. All right, well, thank you so much.

academic entitlement

osteopathic medicine

student professionalism

GPA impact

early intervention