10 Best Medical Schools in the Philippines

It’s time to figure out the answer to the question: what are the best medical schools in the Philippines by 2017? Naturally, we should start by discussing how we determine “the best”.

The Criteria: What Makes “The Best” The Best?

So how do we tell which are the best medical schools in the Philippines? The standards vary. This is why you will see a fair number of lists of this type with differing entries on the Web: different people tend to use different criteria. Say that our chief indicator of quality is a school’s most recent performance in the physician licensure exam. To narrow it down even more, let us say we want only schools whose passing rates for all their examinees have been highest this year (more specifically, for the March 2017 exam). Under this standard, these could be the top 10 medical schools in the country. These are all excellent schools, so as standards and lists go, these were not bad choices.

Addressing Potential Objections

Yet there is an obvious objection: it makes little sense to draw the top 10 from the results of a single exam period. For instance, Saint Luke’s College of Medicine had only 2 examinees for this set of data. Since 1 passed and the other failed, the school would only have a passing rate of 50%. Not very attractive compared to some other passing rates here… and yet hugely misleading. Saint Luke’s is widely acknowledged one of the best medical schools in the country. It regularly places among the top-represented schools in the exam’s passers. In fact, last year (specifically, the September 2016 exam), Saint Luke’s was one of the top-performing schools. Along with Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila, it had a 100% passing rate.

Longitudinal Performance and Passing Rates

Now to further extend the example, let us say we want to consider schools based only on their first-timer passing rates, i.e. the passing rates for examinees taking the exam for the first time. Most will allow Ateneo’s School of Medicine to be one of the best in the field nowadays. It is a relatively young medical school, true, but its record of first-timer passing rates since establishment surely says something: 98.39% in 2012, 100% in 2013, 98.15% in 2014, 99.13% in 2015, and 95.08% in 2016.

Top Schools by Number of Top 10 Passers

What if we considered it based on which schools have had the most passers scoring in the top 10 of the year’s examinees, then? Assuming we were to limit our inquiry to the exam results from the past decade, you would get a slightly different list again:

Another objection: some might argue this new criterion a bit unfair. For instance, UST usually sends the most examinees to the licensure exam each year. From August 2015 to March 2017, for instance, it sent 905 test-takers to the exams. The only school in the same list to come close to that figure was FEU at 643 examinees. In fact, any school that sends more examinees than the others to the exam would have better chances, numerically speaking.

Consistent Performers in Medical Education

A more reasonable way to do this, perhaps, is to inspect schools’ performances over a period of time. One such list that follows this standard came up with a fair roster of candidates for the best medical school in the country (based on first-time test-taker passing rates). In addition to these, though, we feel compelled to mention FEU. This is because it was actually the top-performing school in the licensure exams this year. FEU NRMF actually placed at #14 in the 2015-2017 list above too, so its performance is fairly consistent. With a first-timer passing rate of 88.20% this year and a first-timer passing rate of 91% over the 2015-2017 stretch, it is definitely a school to consider.