Objective: Some residency applicants believe that the date on which they interview with a residency program influences how the program ranks them in the National Residency Matching Program (NRMP). Therefore, the authors studied whether interview date affects match list position in the emergency medicine (EM) residency match.
Methods: Forty-four Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)-accredited EM residency programs participated in this multicenter study. The interview date and match list position were collected for each interviewee for the 1997-98 season. Programs were also asked about factors that might potentially bias interview date assignment. Statistical analyses were performed both with and without these programs included. Interview dates and match list positions were standardized into percentile date and percentile rank for each program and were compared using linear regression analysis. Scatterplots graphed interview date vs match list position. Two-sample t-tests compared interview dates for ranked and nonranked interviewees.
Results: Data were collected for 3,800 individual interviews; 14% of these resulted in unranked applicants. Twenty-three programs, representing 1,997 interviews, reported potential bias in their interview date assignment. Regression analysis revealed an R(2) of 0.018268 (correlation coefficient = 0. 1352, 95% CI = 0.0992 to 0.1617) for all programs, R(2) of 0.010626 (correlation coefficient = 0.1031, 95% CI = 0.0571 to 0.1485) for programs without reported potential bias, and R(2) of 0.02444 (correlation coefficient = 0.1563, 95% CI = 0.10887 to 0.20309) for programs with reported bias. Scatterplots revealed no linear correlation. Two-sample t-tests for all programs, and programs with and without reported bias showed no significant difference in average interview date for ranked and unranked interviewees (both with p > 0.2).
Conclusion: In this study, interview date for EM residency positions in the 1997-98 season did not affect match list position among ranked applicants. Moreover, interview date had nno effect on the decision to leave candidates unranked.