Evaluating Competence in Medical Students

Abstract

Tools to evaluate medical students serve a 2-fold purpose: they are expected to provide an accurate assessment of the clinical abilities of future physicians and to measure the successes and failures of curricular innovations in medical education. Results of educational research are often reported using scores from written examinations such as the US Medical Licensing Examinations (USMLE), faculty evaluations of clerkships, and the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). While numerous barriers to evidence-based research in medical education have been identified,1 another challenge is the discrepancy among results from these different types of evaluations.