[Scope of social medicine 20 years after adoption into medical education--analysis test questions 1976-1996 by the IMPP (Institute for Medical and Pharmaceutical Test Questions)].

The list of educational objectives known as "Gegenstandskatalog" for each discipline within medical education should be represented in constancy at least in the sum of multiple-choice examinations which are part of German licensing regulations. All multiple-choice questions of social medicine which have been used within the last twenty years were looked up and compared with all the objectives of the discipline. The surprising results were: several objectives were highly overrepresented. Others never were asked for, among them such important ones as "social environment and illness", "cooperation in health systems" and "forms of organisation and impact of non-professional support systems". This result of the study undermines the commonly assumed close relation between official educational objectives and multiple-choice questions and therefore the composition of examinations in general. For other disciplines still no similar studies exist. Again it is necessary to ask what are really the educational goals and what are the educational objectives of all the disciplines, if not those of the "Gegenstandskatalog".