For the purpose of creating question banks for the professional examinations of MBBS and BDS, the University Of Health Sciences (UHS) has developed new policy guidelines and standard operating procedures.
The UHS Committee for Conduct of Examinations (CCE) has created the Examiners Toolkit, which will be put into use this year with the regulatory bodies of the university’s approval.
The regulation states that all professional tests have predetermined difficulty levels for the questions, with 20% of the questions being hard, 20% being easy, and 60% being moderate.
The papers will test knowledge, application, and problem-solving skills through a combination of multiple-choice and brief essay questions.
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The selection of paper setters will be based on their background in assessing medical students, their basic knowledge of medical education (such as a certification in health profession education), and their subject area competence.
There will be consistency in the assessment process as it will follow a predetermined format to preserve consistency in question types, levels of difficulty, and grading standards and to increase examinee confidence, easy questions can be positioned at the start of the exam; nevertheless, difficult questions need to be placed at the end to distinguish candidates’ abilities.
The procedure for Finalizing the Paper:
- The guideline additionally guarantees that those responsible for creating paper sets confirm their question-writing process to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognition in order to guarantee a thorough evaluation of students’ comprehension and aptitude. When creating questions, they will go to curriculum-recommended resource books to make sure the content is in line with the requirements.
- According to the Examiners Toolkit, a second topic expert will analyze a paper internally after it has been finalized by the initial paper setter to evaluate its structure, degree of difficulty, alignment with learning objectives, and assessed domains.
- The paper setter will receive the input in order to help with changes and enhancements, ultimately improving the quality of the questions.
- The completed version of the question paper will be made available for testing when the comments have been taken into consideration and adjusted.
Software that can classify items based on discipline, organ system/clinical presentation, question type (e.g., MCQ, SEQ, OSPE/OSCE), years of first and subsequent uses, difficulty index, and discrimination index on first and subsequent uses will be used to store the questions that are chosen after going through a review process in the Question Bank.
The Question Bank will use cloud computing, two-factor authentication (2FA), biometric security, strong passwords that are changed on a regular basis, and document encryption with physical keys to ensure its cyber security.
56 committees of head examiners, three from public colleges and two from private colleges will be formed to carry out these SOPs for the MBBS and BDS programs.
Each committee will have five senior faculty members. For every subject, three sets of question papers will be prepared; only one set will be chosen at random for each exam.
The approved sources and reference books will be used to create these papers, and every attempt will be taken to prevent questions from being repeated twice in a single exam.
The CCE’s standardization processes will guarantee that fundamental and clinical subjects meet the same standards for difficulty, cognitive ability, and integrative techniques.
