Background
Confidence-Based Testing (CBT) or point spreading, assesses students on the correctness of their knowledge and how confident they feel about their answers. It is thought to encourage reflective learning, provide more in dept understanding on learners' preparedness for the session, and positively impact on team readiness assurance test. CBT was introduced to a postgraduate trainee pharmacists programme that uses Team-Based Learning. The project aimed to understand learners’ preparedness for the session, evaluate their confidence levels in relation to different types of question as per Bloom Taxonomy, and difference in confidence levels between genders.

Description
In total, twelve online study days were delivered to 240 learners over the course of six months. Each study day comprised of 10 to 15 formative Readiness Assurance Test (RAT) questions. Each question was categorised as per Bloom Taxonomy (recall, application, understanding, analysis). A 5-point Likert Scale was used to score confidence based on the point spreading (e.g., 4 points- very confident). Descriptive statistics and student t-test were used for data analysis.

Results
In total, there were 44 questions: 21 recall, 18 application, 3, understanding, 2 analysis questions. Learners were very confident (no point spreading) in 79% of answers submitted. Some differences were observed in the proportion of students that were very confident in the different categories of questions, which were not statistically significant, except in recall versus understanding (P = 0.025) and recall vs analysis (P = 0.028) questions. There was no significant difference between level of confidence between male and female trainees in all types of questions.

Conclusions
Our learners were well prepared for online sessions as the use of point spreading was low. There was no significant difference in confidence levels between male and female learners, except in recall type questions. The CBT could be used to inform tailored feedback after RAT.