Personalized tutoring narrows the clinician-faculty gap in General Surgery exam scores among vocational medical students

Abstract Introduction To explore the impact of teaching by clinical educators and faculty educators on the academic performance of vocational medical students, this study analyzed the final exam scores of four classes in the General Surgery course (2023 cohort) at our institution’s School of Clinical Medicine. Methods This study conducted a questionnaire survey of 154 students in the 2023 cohort of the clinical medicine major at our college and collected their final exam scores for the General Surgery course. All data were statistically analyzed using R software and GraphPad Prism 9.5.1. Results Clinical educators are more effective in integrating theoretical knowledge with clinical practice, but they show deficiencies in classroom discipline, learning supervision, and teacher-student interaction. Personalized tutoring can significantly improve the academic performance of students in clinician-taught class, bringing their grades to a level comparable to those in courses taught by faculty educators. Conclusion This study demonstrates that personalized tutoring effectively improves written exam performance in clinician-taught classes to levels comparable with faculty-taught classes, while faculty-taught classes show no significant benefit from additional tutoring. We recommend targeted pedagogical training for clinical educators and implementation of a clinician-faculty collaborative teaching model to better serve vocational medical students’ learning needs.