title: [Qualitative ranking of medical curricula is useless].
abstract: Saying that a qualitative ranking of medical schools would be helpful implies that it is feasible. There are two reasons why this may not be the case. Firstly, any medical school can be characterised by many aspects of varying quality and importance, not necessarily 'good' or 'bad', resulting in an arbitrary assessment of overall quality. Secondly, evaluation of an aspect results in a score on an ordinal scale, which is not suitable for current arithmetic operations. Since the introduction of the visitation system, the qualitative differences between schools have decreased. Therefore, an objective description of each of the medical schools, including its special characteristics, would be more useful for the aspirant student than ranking.
authors.forename: H J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Huisjes
mesh_terms: D019985:Benchmarking; D003479:Curriculum / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D008433:Mathematics; D012577:Schools, Medical / Q000592:standards*