Evaluation of OSPE in Medical Laboratory Sciences Department: Post- Examinations Quality Metrics

Introduction: Assessment plays a major role in improving the learning and teaching process. The practical examination has a key role in the assessment of students' competences. In conventional method, the judgment of students' performances is mainly subjective because the same performance of students is graded differently by different examiners. Successful implementation of OSPE deals with this major deficit of the conventional methods

Assessing the assessment is very important because the implementation of OSPEs are very complex and resource intensive, as it needs large numbers of examiners, candidates and physical resources and equipment as well as time.

Assurance of sufficient quality of OSPEs by a range of metrics that gives us critical view about the assessment process as a whole, rather than focusing on candidate outcomes only.

Objectives of the study: The objectives of this study were

To evaluate OSPEs conducted by Medical laboratory sciences department in Fakeeh College for Medical Sciences(FCMS) with regards to their quality metrics as an assessment tool.

Results: A cross-sectional analytic study was conducted in Medical Laboratory Sciences Department Practical Examinations at FCMS

Before OSPE conduction, the different stations were revised for criteria of content coverage, skills assessed, clarity of language, dominant domain assessed, and time allocated for each station. Post examinations quality metrics results showed that the reliability of the different examination in Medical Laboratory Sciences department ranged from 0.75 to 0.93 that mean good to excellent reliability. One OSPE showed that one or two stations didn't contribute to the overall all reliability of the whole exam. All OSPEs showed that there are good positive correlation between the theoretical and practical part of the course, and this come with the concurrent evidence of validity.