MBBS honours

• Introduction
• Objectives
• When to apply to undertake honours
• New resolutions
• Projects
• Selection of a project

Introduction

The Honours program is an optional program that is offered to provide research training opportunities to students enrolled in the MBBS degree. The program is undertaken concurrently with the rest of the course and allows students to develop a more complete understanding of an area of medical science or clinical medicine under the supervision of an academic member of staff or adjunct staff (e.g. staff of our hospitals who hold academic appointments with the University). Honours will be assessed by a thesis (called “report” till now - typically shorter than the usual ‘thesis’) and a research seminar and will be graded to reward and recognise academic achievement.

Objectives of the program:

1. To provide training in the core research skills required to undertake future clinical or basic medical research.
2. To recognise high academic achievement throughout the MBBS course.

When to apply to undertake honours:

Students can apply to undertake Honours any time from the end of Block 4 in Stage 1 up until 31 March of Stage 3, Year 3.
Research is undertaken from the time of acceptance into the Honours stream until 30 June in Stage 3, Year 4 when the thesis is submitted.

Students enrolled in the Medical Program part-time are not eligible to enrol in Honours.

New Resolutions

To be eligible for the award of Honours students need to achieve the following grades in assessments throughout the 4 years of the MBBS course:

Eligibility for the award of Honours will be contingent upon achieving at least a 75% competency and adjusted for item difficulty in the Stage 2 written summative exam and a pass in all other components of assessment in Stages 1 and 2. When students receive their individual result sheet for the Stage 2 written summative exam, if they are eligible for the Honours program, they will be identified on this assessment sheet as being “eligible for entry into the Honours program”.

In addition, students must obtain a ≥ 75% competency adjusted for item difficulty in at least 48 credit points in Stage 3, Years 3 and 4 of the Medical Program to obtain Honours. Since the Honours program must be integrated into the rest of the course, students can commence Honours on the basis of the above criteria for Stages 1 and 2 but can only be awarded Honours if they satisfy the eligibility criteria given above for Stage 3, Years 3 and 4. If they do not satisfy these criteria but successfully complete a research project, their academic transcript will show that they completed a 12 credit points Research Project.

Students who fail the Research Project will be required to undertake an Elective at the end of the program as an additional unit in order to achieve the correct number of credit points required for the award of MBBS.

Projects

Students will be encouraged to participate in research projects in a wide range of areas including clinical research, medical sciences, rural and public health, and medical education. Students are encouraged to use the Honours research studies as an opportunity to undertake research in international settings. The Honours project must address one of the themes of the Medical Program (Basic and Clinical Sciences, Population Medicine, Patient-Doctor and Personal and Professional Development). Of course, these themes overlap and a project could encompass aspects of more than one theme.

Selection of a Project

The selection of each Honours project is an individual choice for the student. The student should identify an area of interest and seek an appropriate supervisor for the project. In many cases, students will be able to identify potential projects and supervisors based upon their own knowledge of the activities with the Faculty.

It may be possible for more than one student to work on a research project. In this case, however, the supervisor must ensure that each student performs or analyses a different aspect of the project and that each student writes an individual research report.

The individual Honours project should not be an overwhelming additional burden on the student. It must be remembered that these projects are additional to the required self-directed learning of the Medical Program. Supervisors should be aware of this and realise that the workload expected from the students could not be the same as that from full-time Honours students. Accordingly, it is suggested that a student spend an average of 6 hours per week on the project. The anticipated duration of a project is between 6 and 12 months of work. A wide variety of tasks are suitable for Honours projects.

Some suitable tasks are:

• Participation in one aspect of an ongoing research project
• A survey and analysis of results obtained
• A critical writing review of a research or clinical topic
• Participation in special patient clinics and review of ancillary basic and/or clinical science data
• Development and evaluation of educational materials, evaluation tools or analysis of educational issues

These examples are suggestions and it is anticipated that students and potential supervisors will formulate a wide variety of Honours projects. Students should not be expected to set up large new research projects nor should they serve simply as research or clinical assistants. The project application and final report should make clear the student's intellectual input into the work.

More detailed information on MBBS Honours for current students