Action Plan 2: Extend the AAMC’s Leadership Role in Helping Students Progress Through Their Medical Professional Journey

Students and residents need knowledge, guidance, direction, and support to enable them to explore and make confident choices in their profession journeys.

The AAMC is a leader in the research and development of assessments designed to measure competencies along the medical education continuum. In this action plan, the AAMC will lead a coalition of collaborators to implement effective solutions to ensure medical school and residency admission and selection processes are fair, equitable, and feasible.

We’ve made substantial progress on several fronts: 

• We’re continuing to modernize the technologies and data systems that support our service programs to ensure they are stable and continue to evolve. 

• We’re working to improve the learners' user experience to become their go-to source of support. Using ongoing feedback loops we'll be able to provide a streamlined, transparent, and personalized experience that meets their need for guidance, control, and decision support, especially learners who are underrepresented in medicine.   

• Through new and evolving insights, tools and assessments such as the AAMC PREview™ professional readiness exam and innovations to the Electronic Residency Application Service®, we are ensuring greater transparency in the admissions and selection processes, better supporting learners as they make decisions, and giving learners, admissions officers and residency program directors improved insights into learner competencies across the broad range of competencies that are critical to physician selection and education. 

• We’ve conducted research to understand the unmet needs of learners from communities who are underrepresented in medicine. 

• We will continue to employ feedback loops with learners throughout our modernization efforts, ensuring that learners contribute directly through user experience research.  

• We’ll complete a diversity, equity, and inclusion assessment of all AAMC service programs. 

• To enable learners, medical school admissions officers, and residency program directors and their selection teams to effectively and efficiently analyze and communicate learner performance across a broader range of competencies, we are currently expanding the number of medical schools that are participating in the PREview exam for the 2023 application cycle. 

• We’re looking to expand the number of specialties and programs using program signaling (that we tested with the supplemental ERAS® application during the 2022 and 2023 ERAS seasons). 

• Prospective medical students can learn more about the PREview exam and medical schools can learn how to participate in the PREview exam.

• The AAMC has opportunities for medical students and residents to share their experiences, guidance, and input on AAMC learner products and services.