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Setting school-level outcome standards.
- Source :
-
Medical Education . Feb2006, Vol. 40 Issue 2, p166-172. 7p. 3 Charts, 1 Graph. - Publication Year :
- 2006
-
Abstract
- Background To establish international standards for medical schools, an appropriate panel of experts must decide on performance standards. A pilot test of such standards was set in the context of a multidimensional (multiple-choice question examination, objective structured clinical examination, faculty observation) examination at 8 leading schools in China. Methods A group of 16 medical education leaders from a broad array of countries met over a 3-day period. These individuals considered competency domains, examination items, and the percentage of students who could fall below a cut-off score if the school was still to be considered as meeting competencies. This 2-step process started with a discussion of the borderline school and the relative difficulty of a borderline school in achieving acceptable standards in a given competency domain. Committee members then estimated the percentage of students falling below the standard that is tolerable at a borderline school and were allowed to revise their ratings after viewing pilot data. Results Tolerable failure rates ranged from 10% to 26% across competency domains and examination types. As with other standard-setting exercises, standard deviations from initial to final estimates of the tolerable failure rates fell, but the cut-off scores did not change significantly. Final, but not initial cut-off scores were correlated with student failure rates ( r = 0.59, P = 0.03). Discussion This paper describes a method to set school-level outcome standards at an international level based on prior established standard-setting methods. Further refinement of this process and validation using other examinations in other countries will be needed to achieve accurate international standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 03080110
- Volume :
- 40
- Issue :
- 2
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Medical Education
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 19546901
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2929.2005.02374.x