Misconceptions highlighted among medical students in the annual International Intermedical School Physiology Quiz

THE ANNUAL Intermedical School Physiology Quiz (IMSPQ), initiated in 2003, is now an event that attracts a unique, large gathering of selected medical students from medical schools across the globe, as previously described in this journal (4). The 8th IMSPQ, in 2010, hosted by the Department of Physiology, University of Malaya, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, had 200 students representing 41 medical schools from 14 countries participating in the annual quiz, in which two-thirds were overseas teams, including 4 teams from China and teams from 5 Indonesian universities and 5 Thai universities (Table 1). Newly competing teams from Romania, Europe, and Saudi Arabia also participated in the 8th IMSPQ. The challenge trophy for the IMSPQ is named in honor of the late Professor A. Raman, who was the first Malaysian Professor of Physiology at the University of Malaya. From this international sample of medical students, we were interested in observing some of the common mistakes that were made by a significant portion of these students. We report here some illuminating insights gleaned from this international physiology quiz event. This report also highlights some common misconceptions among students of physiology, as has been previously described in definite studies by others (5, 8, 10, 13, 14).