Reliable Assessment of Short Courses in the Medical Curriculum

Abstract

Assessment in medical education is an integral component of
the curriculum. There is a famous notion that assessment drives
learning, and the students respect what you inspect (Mueller.,
2015; Wormald, Schoeman, Somasunderam, and Penn., 2009).
The assessment itself should be valid, reliable, cost-effective, and
feasible and should drive learning.
Over the past few decades, medical education has observed
remarkable changes from a traditional discipline-based
curriculum to an outcome-based curriculum (Haque, Morcke,
Dornan, and Eika., 2013). Most medical schools have adopted
integration at different levels of the ladder. At one end, though,
an integrated curriculum has its own merits and is considered
an advanced form but there are some challenges associated with
this kind. Assessing students in a traditional format, preparing
exam papers with enough items, and getting reasonable
reliability are somehow easy. On the other hand, in an integrated
curriculum, both during clinical and pre-clinical phases, some
courses /modules / blocks remain very short with very limited
curriculum content. Assessment during these courses remains
a challenge to get reliable results. Do we have a minimum
acceptable number of items on a test paper to assess students
properly with sufficient reliable results? Do we have any other
reasonable options for our assessments to be sufficiently reliable?