%X Personal statements and referees' reports are widely used on medical school application forms, particularly in the UK, to assess the suitability of candidates for a career in medicine. However there are few studies which assess the validity of such information for predicting unhappiness or dissatisfaction with a career in medicine. Here we combine data from a long-term prospective study of medical student selection and training, with an experimental approach in which a large number of assessors used a paired comparison technique to predict outcome. %O © 2005 McManus et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. %D 2005 %V 5 %J BMC Medical Education %T Unhappiness and dissatisfaction in doctors cannot be predicted by selectors from medical school application forms: a prospective, longitudinal study. %L discovery61731 %R PMCID: PMC1325230 %A IC McManus %A S Iqbal %A A Chandrarajan %A E Ferguson %A J Leaviss %K Adult, Career choice, Consensus, Educational status, Female, Forecasting, Great Britain, Happiness, Humans, Job satisfaction, Male, Middle aged, Physicians, Prospective studies, Records as topic, School admission criteria, Self-assessment, Students, Medical %C England