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Assessment of the students: Tools used in Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
Assessment of students is a matter of great concern. It is known that of all the different components of a medical education program, the assessment strategies direct and influence the way students learn. Lack of objectivity and varying standard on the part of examination in terms of validity, reliability and practicability are issues of concern for medical educators. to make the assessment valid, reliable, objective and practical the School of Medical Sciences Universiti Sains Malaysia uses a variety of relevant assessment tools e.g. MCQs, MEQs, OSCE/OSPE, long cases, short cases and also viva voce for distinction and borderline students with a mission to have a center of excellence. This paper describes the use of assessment tools the medical school to make the assessment valid, reliable, objective and practical.
Multiple choice questions (MCQ) are the most widely used objective test items. Students often learn what we assess, and not what we teach, although teaching and assessment are the two sides of the same coin. So, assessment in medical education is very important to ensure that qualified competent doctors are being produced.A good test is the test that assesses higher level of thinking skills. Many inhouse MCQs are found faulty which assess lower level of thinking skills. The main problems in constructing good MCQs are that (i) very few faculty members have formal training in questions construction, (ii) most of the questions are prepared in the last minutes where little time exist for vetting to review the quality of questions and (iii) lack of promise on the standard of the question format and underestimation of the use of blueprint in medical schools. Constructing good MCQs, emphasis should be given that, the stem is meaningful and present a definite problem, it contains only relevant material and avoid negativity. It should be ensuring that, all options present as plausible, clear and concise, mutually exclusive, logical in order, free from clues and avoid ‘all of the above’ and ‘none of the above’. The MCQs can tests well any higher level of the cognitive domain, if it is constructed well. Efforts must be made to prepare and use of test blueprint as a guide to construct good MCQs. This paper describes and offers medical teachers a window to a comprehensive understanding of different types and aspects of MCQs and how to construct test blueprint and good MCQs that tests higher order thinking skills in the future medical graduates, thereby ensures competent doctors are being produced.International Journal of Human and Health Sciences Vol. 04 No. 02 April’20 Page : 79-88
System approach is a term that means to do something systematically. In educational industry, to teach systematically teachers must consider input, process and output and decide objectives, contents, methods and assessment. The inputs are basically the objectives and objectified contents that teachers put in while the processess are the methods of delivery of contents. Outputs are the end-product of edu-cational inputs and process those must be assessed based on objectives. Probably the most difficult struggle facing the educational industry is about how the curriculum to be customized. Curriculum is the result of piec-ing together of a number of information including vision and mission statements of educational institutions. Objectives, contents, methods and assessment are the key elements of a curriculum. Though medical education is in the process of changing, there are big prob-lem in undergraduate medical education due to lack of objectivity, overloaded content, improper methods of content delivery and inappropriate ways of assessment of out-put. 1,2,3 The input, process and output must be relevant and there must have the right mix of curricular objectives, contents, methods and assessment aimed to produce competent and confident medical practitioners. This paper briefly emphasizes on the needs of alignment of key elements of a curriculum and fit these as input, process and output to meet up the system approach in education. By prop-er implementation of the system approach the educational managers can be able to raise the standard of education and assure the quality and excellence in performance. An input should include objectives and objec-tified contents. Objectives are statements of desire, expected to achieve by the learners at the end of an educational programme. The purpose of learning objective is to communi-cate the desire. Excessive details or a vague statement of desire is a common concern in inputs which may obscure the overall con-cepts or aim of the curriculum. 2,4 Educational objectives are classified in three domains. Cognitive relates to thinking, affective relates to feeling and psychomotor domain relates to acting or doing. Well written learning objec-tives in terms of thinking, feeling and doing are the heart of any curriculum. To write an objective, educators need to considers four parts, the acronym of which is ABCD, where " A " stands for the audience or the learners for whom the objectives are written; " B " stands for behaviour which is a verb that describes what the learners will be able to think, feel and do at the end of the instruction; " C " stands for the conditions which are the circumstances under which the objectives must be complet-ed; " D " stands for degree which are the stan-dard or accuracy that learners have to achieve. Learning objectives should be SMART, an acronym of specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bounding. If objectives are identified clearly then the outcomes, which are the end results of any curriculum or pro-gramme can be pre-determined and achieved. If any part of the objective is missing from the statement, it cannot be communicated accu-rately and the outcome cannot be determined firmly. Contents as inputs should be matched with objectives i.e. it should be clearly correlated with the objectives which are then named as objectified contents. Objectified contents should be specified in terms of cognitive, affective and psychomotor skills learning. Content overload with unrelated specific objectives is a common concern in medical education. To select content, educators have to decide the core and optional portion of a topic
Background: Medical education in Bangladesh is totally controlled by the Government and run a unique undergraduate curriculum throughout the country in both public and private sectors. This paper is aimed to briefly describe the medical education reform in Bangladesh and suggests further assessment changes. The present official form of undergraduate medical curriculum has first evolved in 1988 followed by revision in 2002 and 2012. Assessment and teaching are the two sides of the same coin. Assessment drives learning and learning drives practices. Following the curriculum reform since 2002, the assessment in undergraduate medical education has been greatly changed. There are a lot of in-course formative assessments which include item examination, card final and term final, designed to improve the quality of education. Ten percent marks of summative written examinations derive from formative assessment. Traditional oral examination has been changed to structured form to ensure greater reliability. Even then, teachers are not yet building up to conduct oral examination in such a structured way. Examiners differ in their personality, style and level of experience with variation of questioning and scoring from student to students. Weakness of reliability on oral examination still exists. Students also feel very stressful during the oral examinations. Moreover, to conduct such oral examination, three to four months times per year are lost by the faculties which can be efficiently utilised for teaching and research purposes. Worlds' leading medical schools now-a-days used oral examination only for borderline and distinction students. Bangladesh also must consider oral examination only for borderline and distinction students.
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