Performance of graduates of foreign medical schools on the examinations of the American Board of Internal Medicine.

We investigated the performance of two groups of graduates of foreign medical schools on the 1975 and 1976 certification examinations of the American Board of Internal Medicine. Nearly all their postdoctoral residency training was obtained in the United States. The performance (most of those in this study were born in Asia and Southeast Asia) was much lower than that of graduates of United States medical schools. United States citizens who studied medicine abroad performed no better than alien graduates from foreign medical schools. Approximately half the foreign graduates born in the United States studied in Italy, and 10% in Switzerland, Mexico and Belgium. There were no significant differences in performance associated with the type of postdoctoral training (university, university-affiliated, community or other) undertaken in the United States. A significant inverse relation was observed between the interval from completion of training to first examination and the examination performance.