The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) marked its 150th anniversary at Learn Serve Lead 2026, held November 6–10 in Anaheim, California. Alongside programming on research, health policy, and the physician workforce, the education sessions addressed some difficult decisions facing medical schools such as how to grade clerkships, assess readiness for residency, and prepare students to use AI in clinical practice.
Several parts of the program deserve a closer look for institutions working on curriculum, assessment, and learner support.
What Clerkship Grades Are Being Asked to Do
Clerkship grades carry competing expectations. They contribute to residency selection while also serving as feedback to learners and evidence of progress toward competence. A multi-institutional panel examined those tensions, including the effects of grading on motivation, well-being, and equity. Its scope acknowledged the trade-offs schools face when choosing an approach.
The program also addressed the mechanics of competency-based medical education (CBME). An AAMC–NBME workshop focused on mapping assessment methods to the AAMC-AACOM-ACGME Undergraduate Medical Education Foundational Competencies and designing longitudinal assessment systems that incorporate feedback and coaching. A separate session considered how medical schools can establish competency committees, drawing on experience from graduate medical education.
Learners' preparation for these systems received attention as well. For example, a session drawing on a five-institution dataset examined whether students have the self-regulated learning skills CBME expects of them, particularly the ability to reflect on performance and plan their learning. Undoubtedly, those skills need attention alongside the assessment system itself.
Teaching Physicians to Use AI
AI appeared in sessions ranging from admissions to educational oversight. Within the curriculum, the focus included what physicians should understand about the technology and how schools can assess that knowledge.
The AAMC’s national AI competency effort was featured alongside a core curriculum developed through a multi-institutional task force following the Millennium Conference 2025. That curriculum addressed clinical applications, limitations and biases, ethics, and professionalism. Another session examined the risks of deskilling and the role of productive friction in helping learners develop their own expertise.
AI in the context of student affairs appeared in conference discourse several times. There was a noteworthy session on AI-supported advising that covered applications such as drafting advising notes, developing specialty guides, and synthesizing interview-season data. It also explicitly identified situations where AI should not be used, including mental-health communication, disciplinary decisions, and high-stakes professionalism concerns. This level of specificity gave institutions something concrete to consider for when reviewing their own practices.
Learning From the First Months of Residency
How graduates perform after leaving medical school can help educators evaluate the preparation they received. One session focused on two sources of that information: the AAMC Resident Readiness Survey and ACGME Milestones data. It examined how schools can use feedback about graduates' early residency performance to inform curricular improvement.
Related conversations on the National Collaborative to Improve the Transition to Residency covered specialty choice, program selection, readiness, and onboarding. The discussion here focused on thinking of those stages together and how that mindset broadens the responsibilities involved in preparing a student for residency. The idea was that advising someone through an application and helping them begin clinical work are, in fact, connected parts of that preparation.
The program also included research presentations examining links between clerkship performance and residency outcomes, giving the assessment discussions a direct connection to graduates' subsequent training.
Agreeing on What the Data Means
Common data standards received dedicated attention through a session covering the Educational Data Framework, Educational Methodology Working Group, and Physician Data Initiative. These efforts address how information is collected, reported, and shared across medical education and the physician workforce.
A separate session explored how institutions can use AAMC/AACOM Curriculum SCOPE Survey data to inform curriculum changes and assess accreditation readiness. For schools comparing their programs with others, the relationship between these topics is straightforward: interpreting a comparison requires understanding what was measured and how it was defined. Shared terminology is part of making that work reliable.
Clinical Placements and the Regional Campus Experience
Competition for clinical rotation sites was the subject of a session examining the scale of the problem and institutional approaches to addressing it. The program included cases from leaders facing placement shortages, with attention to strategies that could be adapted to different local circumstances.
Regional campus programming examined the responsibilities involved in delivering education across dispersed sites. Topics included consistent clerkship expectations, access to student services, engagement with community-based faculty, and monitoring student outcomes.
A consensus expressed by attendees seemed to be that for institutions managing distributed clinical education, these responsibilities belong in the same planning conversation as placement capacity. A new site brings teaching and support requirements that need to be understood when the placement is arranged.
The Learning Environment Students Experience
One session addressed "behavior-value incongruence", basically the disconnect students can encounter between the professional values they are taught and the conduct they observe in clinical settings. It focused on learners’ experiences and gave the program’s broader attention to humanism a specific educational context.
Other sessions examined circumstances in which institutional support can become difficult to coordinate. The leave-of-absence session, for example, considered scheduling and return-to-learning alongside students’ experiences of stigma, financial strain, and disconnection. A workshop on well-being initiatives addressed how schools can evaluate whether their efforts are helping.
These topics gave institutions specific practices to review such as how students remain connected during a leave, how they are supported when they return, and how the school assesses the effectiveness of that support.
Looking Ahead
Preparing students for clinical responsibility was a shared concern across the entire LSL 2026 education program. Teaching responsible AI use raised questions about how to assess independent judgment. Decisions about clerkship grading affect both feedback to students and how residency programs understand their preparation. Graduates' early performance can in turn help schools reconsider what they teach and the clinical experiences they provide. For medical schools, these connections are worth examining together. Bringing curriculum, assessment, and student support colleagues into that work can help identify where expectations diverge or preparation falls short—and give institutions a clearer basis for deciding what to change.
Elentra helps medical schools connect curriculum expectations with assessment evidence and clinical experiences, giving educators a clearer view of how learners are progressing and where they need support. As your institution refines competency-based assessment or reviews the consistency of clinical education across sites, those connections can help inform decisions about students' preparation for residency. To explore how Elentra can support this work at your institution—contact us today.