Summative assessments often lead students to focus on rote memorization rather than deep understanding. Frequently they are not designed to provide detailed feedback for improvement. That is why faculty should emphasize that rather to pursue approving standardized exams, it should also align with the objectives of the courses taught and also promote effective strategies to comprehend complex medical subjects.

General objectives:

• Introduce summative assessments in pre-clerkship years such as single-best answer multiple choice, short answer, and essay-type questions.
• Focus on the purpose and structure of summative MCQ assessments.
• Promote techniques for constructing quality assessments for continuous improvement of the summative items.

Workshop Schedule:

• 12:30 - 1:30 (1 hour) Aligning course objectives and NBME/NBOME topics to elaborate MCQ items
  • Establish a common ground between course objectives and assessments using NBME/NBOME format.
  • Design multiple-choice questions (MCQs) that foster reasoning over memorization
• 1:30 - 2:30 (1 hour) Purpose of summative assessment in learner progression
  • Identify how institutions are using summative assess to gauge learning outcomes
  • Identify how summative assessment help to track learner progress
• 2:30 - 3:30 (1 hour) Critique basic lower-level questions and transform those questions to high-order question items
  • Evaluate quality of the MCQ item.
  • Criteria of a high-order question