A questionnaire survey of newly enrolled medical students on the sensitivity to human death and dying was conducted at Yamaguchi University in June 1997 and June 1998. The survey was performed during lectures of an elective liberal arts course in medical ethics for first-year students. Responses were received from 415 students, including 63 medical students. Answers from new medical students were compared with those from new students of other faculties. Our results show that our medical school entrance examination does not generally select students with a high motivation for bioethics. We should consider further improvement in the curriculum of the introduction to medicine (igakugairon in Japanese).

We introduced active educational methods in medical ethics education and evaluated their effect on medical students. Three methods were used: 1) small-group discussion to clarify the clinical ethical issues, 2) self-study to analyze examples of doctors' explanations to patients, and 3) self-study with videotapes to recognize informed consent. We asked students to write a report on each subject of the three studies. Before grading their reports, we determined a standard answer for each subject and marked their reports according to an absolute standard. We found the mean value and standard error of the students' scores in study 1 were significantly higher than those in study 2 or 3. These results suggest that small-group discussion is an effective educational method and useful in the analysis of clinical ethical issues.

Recently, as the practical training for clinical skills are extensively introduced in the curriculum of medical schools, the objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) is taken to assess the clinical skills of trainees. However, there have been very few papers mentioned about correlation between scores on a written examination of the clinical sciences and those on OSCE in Japan. In this study, to compare these of two kinds of examinations in year five medical students of Yamaguchi University, their scores of the stations of OSCE and those of the written examinations of clinical sciences which seemed to correlate stations of skill's examinations were studied statistically. As a result, there were no statistical significances in each scores between skill's evaluations and written tests. This results that these two examinations estimated the different abilities of students on the taxonomy of medical education. Moreover, OSCE is reconfirmed to be identical as an evaluative method of clinical skills. Now, new medical educational systems should be introducted for the training of skills and attitude for students.