Rationale and objective: Enormous resources are spent on the selection process for radiology residency, yet agreement on criteria, process, and outcome remains elusive. The aim was to develop, implement, and evaluate a spreadsheet application that streamlined the creation of a match list for resident selection.
Materials and methods: The Department of Radiology's traditional procedure of screening, interviewing, and rating candidates was left intact because the selection committee could not reach consensus regarding possible improvements in the process or outcome measures. We developed a spreadsheet application that used the ratings of candidate desirability for our program from our preexisting process to create a tentative match list by adding a system of ordinal ranking and weighting. After 4 years of use, the fairness and usefulness of this application were evaluated by members of the selection committee by means of a survey.
Results: The spreadsheet application was used to create tentative match lists for 4 years. The system eliminated ties among candidates on the preliminary match list and met the expectations of a majority of the selection committee members for fairness, objectivity, efficiency, and results.
Conclusion: A spreadsheet application can streamline the process of resident selection without having to resolve underlying conflicts about selection criteria and outcome measures.