The Mini Clinical Evaluation Exercise (mini-CEX).

The article describes the mini Clinical Evaluation Exercise or mini-CEX, a method for simultaneously assessing the clinical skills of trainees and offering feedback on their performance, recounts on how it was developed and illustrates its use in the Modernizing Medical Careers Foundation Program Assessment in the U. S. The validity and reliability of mini-CEX is derived by observing the trainees while engaged with a series of real patients in different practice setting and judgments about the quality of the encounter made by skilled educator-clinicians. Its educational effects are based on a significant increase in the number of occasions on which trainees are directly observed with patients and offered feedback on their performance.