BACKGROUND: Despite the central importance of physical examination (PE) skills to patient evaluation, early trainees struggle with its correct application and interpretation. This struggle may reflect the instructional strategies of PE courses which have largely ignored the clinical reasoning necessary to accurately apply these skills. The core + cluster (C + C) is a recent approach to teaching PE to clerkship-level medical students that combines a basic core exam with cluster based on the students hypothesis about their patients clinical presentation. Our institution developed a novel C + C curriculum to teach PE to preclinical students. We aimed to assess the impact of this new curriculum on students clinical skills and course evaluations in comparison to the traditional head-to-toe approach wed used previously. METHODS: This was a retrospective study comparing two consecutive medical school cohorts exposed to the new (C + C) and prior (HTT) curricula respectively. We studied two complete cohorts of first-year medical students at our institution who matriculated in 2014 and 2015. The 2014 cohort received PE training via an HTT approach. The 2015 cohort received PE training via a C + C approach. Outcomes included performance scores on a statewide clinical performance exam (CPX) and student course evaluations. RESULTS: We found no statistically significant difference in mean CPX scores between the two cohorts. However, student course ratings were significantly higher in the C + C cohort and students rated the C + C format as highly useful in clinical encounters. CONCLUSIONS: The C + C curriculum appears to be as effective a method of teaching PE to preclinical students as the HTT approach and is better received by students. We believe that this approach more appropriately reflects the way PE is used in clinical encounters and may help students with diagnostic hypothesis generation.