LAUSR

To the Editor, Clinical Anatomy: We are most grateful for the helpful comments concerning our article. This belongs to a series of investigations we are undertaking to evaluate the skills, attributes, and attitudes that are expected of medical students (see Moxham et al., 2018). In the present article, raw marks are required for two reasons. First, there are issues of institutional confidentiality that must be observed. Second, since the aim of the study is only to see within the first year cohort of medical students where anatomy performance is related to knowledge of the classical languages then raw marks remain valid to test our hypotheses. Of course, should the study be extended to see whether examination performances are affected in other years of study, and/or in different subject areas, there would be a need to standardize the marks. In such instances, percentages might be appropriate. We agree with your correspondents that socio-economic factors could influence the findings because so many of the medical students who had knowledge of the classical languages came from fee-paying, private schools. Indeed, we acknowledged in our discussion that the students with classical languages and from private schools could be more studious (i.e., geekish in vulgar parlance). We are looking into these issues by extending our studies across different countries and cultures. Nevertheless, given that there is evidence of improved performance in anatomy examinations for those with classical languages, it seems to us to be incumbent to provide some tuition in the medical course, albeit if only briefly, to aid students in the development of their anatomical and medical terminologies. The correspondents suggest that there should be optional, student-selected components (SSCs) within the medical curriculum to do this. Here, we disagree. ALL students should benefit and it would not be justifiable to provide tuition for just some students knowing that it could be advantageous for medical education more generally. For a discussion concerning optionality, see Moxham and Pais (2016).