Perspectives of graduates two or five years after graduation from a three-year medical school.

The 1970s have been described as an era of the rise and fall of three-year medical school programs. The present paper describes how graduates of one of the few North American medical schools that has retained its three-year curriculum view the problem-based curriculum and its length. On the whole the graduates of McMaster University School of Medicine were very positive about their undergraduate medical education. Many more of its features were endorsed as strengths than deficiencies. Eighty-two percent of McMaster graduates reported they would enroll in a three-year curriculum if they were entering medical school again, and they said that the advantages of a three-year curriculum outweight its disadvantages. The majority of graduates would return to a problem-based medical curriculum: 58 percent to an unaltered curriculum, 3 percent to one altered slightly, and 8 percent to one spread over four years. Of those that would not return, most chose a somewhat more structured curriculum, while very few chose traditional curricula.