Evaluating psychiatric clinical clerks with a mini-objective structured clinical examination.

Although objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) are well-accepted performance-based assessments with good reliability, psychiatric educators have been slow to adopt this evaluation method, opting for oral exams that often have inferior psychometric properties. A 4-station "mini-OSCE" was developed and used to test 42 clinical clerks in psychiatry. The examination mean score and standard deviation were 74% and 8.08, respectively, while individual scores ranged from 56% to 86%. Interstation reliability was 0.61. Student and faculty satisfaction was high. A "mini-OSCE" for psychiatric clinical clerks confers the benefits of acceptable reliability and a high degree of acceptance without incurring the high costs usually associated with OSCE evaluation.