Perfiles de calificaciones obtenidas por estudiantes de medicina en la asignatura Salud Pública durante los cursos académicos desde 2005 hasta 2008

introduction: in the cuban higher medical education system learning evaluation involves control and assessment of knowledge, skills and habits, as well as the performance that students are acquiring through the educational process. objective: to compare the results of the final evaluations of the subject public health during the academic years 2005-2006, 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 with the other subjects that were taught in the fifth year of the medical career during those periods. methods: a descriptive and retrospective study was carried out in 790 students who completed the fifth year in the medical college 2 of santiago de cuba for three academic years (2005-2008). results: in the series grades of all students were evaluated in the 11 subjects of the curriculum and it was found that in the public health subject during these 3 reference years, 8 students scored 2, 57 passed with grades 3, 255 with 4 and 470 students with 5. only in urology subject the percentage of students (34.2) with grades 5 was in an "expected profile", while public health was above that rate (59.5%). for grades 4 there were 32.3% of students in public health, 55.1% in urology and 20 to 23% in other subjects. similarly, when analyzing grades of 3 and 2, public health subject had the highest rate of students (7.2%), followed by urology (6.8%) for the former, unlike the latter, which predominated in the urology subject (3.9%), followed by public health (1.0%); the remaining subjects were maintained with lower rates. conclusions: the analysis of cases showed a pattern of excessive grades of 4 and 5, so that it is necessary to deepen the study of factors that influence the evaluation process of these subjects. also, it was felt that it would be interesting to compare the grade profiles with those of other colleges in the country.