Abstract:
Abstract
Introduction: Determining whether the standard of an examination is appropriate is a difficult
task. It is important for examiners and examinees to be aware of the standard of the examination.
We compared the examination standards perceived by medical students with that of the
examiners. Materials and Methods: A descriptive comparative study was carried out on a sample
of final-year medical students from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo. All finalyear students of a given year of intake were requested to devise true/false type, negatively marked,
5-response multiple-choice questions at a standard they thought suitable for students sitting the
final MBBS examination in Paediatrics. Ambiguous and wrongly worded questions were
excluded. A “mock” multiple-choice question paper of randomly selected student generated
multiple-choice questions was held a fortnight prior to the final paediatric examination. The
students were unaware that the multiple-choice questions in the “mock” examination had been
devised by their peers. Marks obtained at the “mock” and final examinations were compared and
the difficulty index was calculated for both papers. Results: Correlation between marks obtained
at the 2 multiple-choice question papers was moderate (r = 0.67) and significant (P <0.01). The
mean marks for the “mock” examination, 47.1% [standard deviation (SD) ±9.2], and for the final
examination, 58.9% (SD ±8.7), showed a statistically significant difference (P <0.0001). Conclusion: This study showed that student-set multiple-choice questions correlated significantly with
those of the university but were of a tougher standard
