Adjusting for Resident Rater Leniency or Severity Improves the Reliability of Routine Resident Evaluations of Faculty Anesthesiologists

Background The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) of the United States requires all programs to evaluate faculty performance annually. Multiple universities require all faculty to be reviewed annually. These high-stakes evaluations should be reliable. When one anesthesiologist is said to perform better than another, there should be neither frequent Type I errors (i.e., an anesthesiologist is determined to perform better or worse than average when their performance is average) nor Type II errors (i.e., failure to detect above or below average performance). We investigated the generalizability of the finding that if adjustment is not made for rater leniency/severity, results will be statistically unreliable. Methods University of Florida 11-item evaluations were sent on Mondays, over the 2018-19 academic year. 108 ratees (anesthesiologists) had 3302 evaluations by 85 raters (resident physicians). The replicability of the results was assessed by making a comparison with previously published findings from the University of Toronto and the University of Iowa. Results As observed at the University of Toronto, there was greater heterogeneity of scores among raters than among ratees (raters’ eta-squared 0.40; ratees’ 0.22). As observed at the University of Iowa, the Florida rater leniency/severity of scores could not validly be modeled based on a normal distribution, because the distribution of each rater’s mean among raters was not normally distributed (Shapiro-Wilk W = 0.90 (P = 0.00002) among the 75 raters with ≤9 evaluations). Likewise, matching Iowa, Florida’s distribution of each ratee’s mean among ratees was not normally distributed (W = 0.91 (P = 0.00001) among the 94 ratees with ≤9 evaluations). In contrast, treat evaluations with all items scored the maximum as having a value of 1, otherwise 0. As for Iowa, Florida’s corresponding probability distributions of logits were normally distributed (W = 0.99 (P = 0.90) among raters and W = 0.98 (P = 0.09) among ratees, respectively). Rater leniency/severity remained large in the logit scale, with an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.55. In the original scale, 0/108 ratees had performance that differed significantly from the grand mean of 4.63, using a P < 0.01 criterion. The alternative analysis approach adjusted for the raters’ leniency/severity. Seven ratees were significantly below average (P ≤ 0.0048) and 17 above average (P ≤ 0.0086). Because statistical assumptions were satisfied, analysis in the original scale had a 22% (24/108) false negative rate, like the 21% observed previously at the University of Iowa. Conclusions Routine evaluations of faculty anesthesiologist ratees by anesthesiology resident raters give statistically unreliable results, falsely categorizing performance, unless analyses are adjusted for the covariates of raters. The need for adjustment found with the University of Florida data matches the need for this type of adjustment found at the University of Iowa and the University of Toronto. Thus, this adjustment for raters’ leniency/severity appears to be a general finding for rater/ratee routine evaluations.

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