Background: Altruism in the medical world is very important because it is one of the medical competency standards of professionalism and professional behavior. Cognitive abilities in this case the value of the test is still a measure of the success of students in the traditional perspective. Objective: The purpose of this study is to find out the relationship between altruism and cognitive abilities Research Method: This study is a cross-sectional descriptive analytic study. Sampling in this study was taken by simple random sampling. The total number of samples in this study were 272 students. The measuring instrument in this study uses a questionnaire with 20 questions. Result: In this study there was a correlation between altruism and cognitive abilities with a probability (p) of 0.001 and a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.201 which indicates that the results of this study are weak Discussion: In this study, the results obtained if altruism is weakly related to cognitive abilities because there is a dominant element in cognitive abilities that there is no correlation with the altruism attitude of students compared to non-dominant elements Conclusions: Based on this research, it can be concluded if the higher level of student altruism is not too influential or weakly related to the high cognitive abilities of the student.