Summative assessment in a doctor of pharmacy program: a critical insight
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The Canadian-accredited post-baccalaureate Doctor of Pharmacy program at Qatar University trains pharmacists to deliver advanced patient care. Emphasis on acquisition and development of the necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes lies in the curriculum's extensive experiential component. A campus-based oral comprehensive examination (OCE) was devised to emulate a clinical viva voce and complement the extensive formative assessments conducted at experiential practice sites throughout the curriculum. We describe an evaluation of the final exit summative assessment for this graduate program. METHODS: OCE results since the inception of the graduate program (3 years ago) were retrieved and recorded into a blinded database. Examination scores among each paired faculty examiner team were analyzed for inter-rater reliability and linearity of agreement using intraclass correlation and Spearman's correlation coefficient measurements, respectively. Graduate student ranking from individual examiner OCE scores was compared with that of other relative ranked student performance. RESULTS: Sixty-one OCEs were administered to 30 graduate students over 3 years by a composite of eleven different pairs of faculty examiners. Intraclass correlation measures demonstrated that examiner team reliability was low and linearity of agreements was inconsistent. Only one examiner team in each respective academic year was found to have statistically significant inter-rater reliability, and linearity of agreements was inconsistent in all years. No association was found between examination performance rankings and other academic parameters. CONCLUSION: Critical review of our final summative assessment implies it is lacking robustness and defensibility. Measures are in place to continue the quality improvement process and develop and implement an alternative means of evaluation within a more authentic context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.063 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".