A comparative study of students' performance in preclinical physiology assessed by short and long essays.

Abstract

The performance of 540 medical (MBBS) and 55 dental (BDS) students in short essay questions (SEQs) in preclinical physiology was compared with their performance in long essay questions (LEQs). The cohort was made up of 88 repeating and 452 non-repeating MBBS students and 12 repeating and 43 non-repeating BDS students. The SEQs and LEQs used for the study were those administered to the students in the paper II of the Part I MBBS/BDS examination.The results showed that all the students did significantly better in LEQs than in SEQs. When the students were sub-divided into repeaters and non-repeaters, performance in LEQs was still significantly better in all cases, except in the BDS repeaters where the difference was not significant. The study also showed that the BDS students did significantly better than the MBBS students in LEQs. Further analysis showed that the latter was due to a much better performance in LEQ 4 by the BDS students. In the SEQs, MBBS non-repeaters did better than repeaters while the situation was reversed with the BDS students. For all categories of students, on no occasion was the mean score in the LEQs or the SEQs up to 20.0, which is the 50% score and pass mark in this examination.The likely reasons for the better performance of the students in LEQs than in SEQs were discussed. The better performance of the BDS students in LEQs is believed to be due to the double exposure time of the BDS students to the topics from which LEQ 4 is drawn. From our results, it was concluded that LEQs are more useful than SEQs in assessing these students. In addition, the highly significant cross-correlation between scores in questions 1, 2, 3 and 4 suggested that the inherent problem of examiners' subjective judgement in essay marking could be minimized in both SEQs and LEQs. Finally, failure to achieve a mean score of 50% (pass mark) in both SEQs and LEQs suggested that the students are weak in essay writing. Possible reasons for this were suggested