Assessment
Assessment is an important part of study, serving the learning process in a number of key ways.
The assessment process determines the standard students are working towards and demonstrates the standard students are achieving. Regular assessments allow students to view their progress and development, as well as providing students with regular feedback, and this approach to assessment can highlight any problems a student may have with learning early on.
Feedback is a very important part of the assessment process within the School and formative and summative assessments are used to help provide students with continuous feedback. This is provided in different ways from assessors, tutors, peers and small groups, and can help students identify strengths as well as areas requiring improvement.
There are four modules in Year 1, four modules in Year 2, and three modules in each of Years 3, 4 and 5, and students must successfully complete each module to be able to progress to the next year of study. One of the modules is the Medical Knowledge module which runs in each of Years 1-5 and assesses students with a Progress Test four times in each year. The test is delivered in a multiple choice format and is designed to assess long-term and functional knowledge, and measures how much a student is learning rather than how good a student may be at revising or cramming.
Students will receive a percentage score and grade for each test as well as the mean percentage for each test for their current year, and they are provided with a line graph which plots their performance against the cohort mean, as indicated in the graph below.
This graph shows the progress of a student who has completed all 5 years of study and has 20 Progress Test results.
The other modules assess clinical performance, professional behaviours and students are also assessed in the Student Selected Component modules, where students have the opportunity to select the environment they will study in from a large catalogue of options. Some of the other key assessments include:
- Clinical Competencies - these take place both in a clinical skills centre setting (in vitro) and in the healthcare setting with real patients (in vivo)
- Professionalism Judgements – assessment of professional behaviours in various settings
- Portfolio Analysis – assessment of reflective essays
- Special Study Units – assessment of written reports and presentations
- ISCEs (integrated Structured Clinical Examinations) which take place towards the end of Year 2 and Year 4.