| Background Measuring professionalism in pre-clinical medical students often become a challenge to medical educators. As a follow-up to the application of Conscientiousness Index (CI), this research aimed to conduct a pilot study and to compare CI from first to fourth year students at SM-AJCUI. Objectives The aims of this study were to describe the lecturers perception of CI, differences of CI scores between all batch, and lecturers evaluation of CI. Methods CI components were formulated based on objective measurements received from the interviews of 12 educators. The components comprise attendance, obedience to rules, submission of evaluative feedbacks, thoroughness of assignments and clinical skills, submissions of assignments, voluntarism, excellence, and academic misconduct. CI scores were collected from year 1–4 pre-clinical students (n=144) during the odd semester 2014-2015, one unit block for each batch. Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was conducted for normality, continued with Kruskal-Wallis test. As an evaluation, final interviews were conducted with 9 educators. Results Data from Kruskal-Wallis test showed a significant difference in total CI scores from year 1–4 (p=.000). Furthermore, post-hoc analysis also found significant differences in each batch, except between year 1 and 4 (p=.388). Conclusion Our findings suggest that there was significant difference of CI scores from year 1–4. However, the limitation of our CI measurement is that some of CI components were not stable between one batch and another, like voluntarism, assignments, and excellence. Clearly 12 lecturers endorsed the importance of CI, yet 2 of them doubt its applicability. This may reveal the lack of lecturer’s understanding and commitment to assess students’ performance using CI. Therefore, further study needs to involve academic advisors as CI evaluators to assure practical implementation of CI, as well as faculty commitment to assess students’ professionalism and improving the use of students’ centered learning, such as e-learning. |