DefinePK

Abstract

Assessment in medical education is an integral component ofthe curriculum. There is a famous notion that assessment driveslearning, and the students respect what you inspect (Mueller.,2015; Wormald, Schoeman, Somasunderam, and Penn., 2009).The assessment itself should be valid, reliable, cost-effective, andfeasible and should drive learning.Over the past few decades, medical education has observedremarkable changes from a traditional discipline-basedcurriculum to an outcome-based curriculum (Haque, Morcke,Dornan, and Eika., 2013). Most medical schools have adoptedintegration at different levels of the ladder. At one end, though,an integrated curriculum has its own merits and is consideredan advanced form but there are some challenges associated withthis kind. Assessing students in a traditional format, preparingexam papers with enough items, and getting reasonablereliability are somehow easy. On the other hand, in an integratedcurriculum, both during clinical and pre-clinical phases, somecourses /modules / blocks remain very short with very limitedcurriculum content. Assessment during these courses remainsa challenge to get reliable results. Do we have a minimumacceptable number of items on a test paper to assess studentsproperly with sufficient reliable results? Do we have any otherreasonable options for our assessments to be sufficiently reliable?