Dear Sir
Medical schools, due to sheer number of students sitting OSCEs, have to run the same examination simultaneously on multiple sites and at multiple runs (repetitions of the same stations multiple times over the course of the day); there is often a number of runs in the morning and a number of runs in the afternoon. Due to the high stakes of these exams, students and educators are concerned regarding possible disadvantaging of morning students compared to afternoon students due to ‘content leakage’. One way to avoid this perceived disadvantaging is to quarantine students in university premises. There are a number of possible ways to do this: to quarantine the whole class for the whole day in pre- and post-exam groups; to quarantine all candidates pre-exam and release them when they have completed the exam; quarantining students after they have sat their examination until all students have finished. We define quarantine in this situation as “a place of isolation” and in this situation would have to also mean full electronic isolation – no mobile telephones/iPads, etc.
Whilst quarantining may have advantages in terms of minimising collusion, it could also cause further stress to candidates waiting to sit their exam. On the other hand, universities have a duty to the public to ensure exam security. It is not known how many medical schools utilise quarantine or whether students find it acceptable.
Parks et al. (Citation2006) provide an interesting analysis of the results of collusion reported by students themselves. Collusion was reported by 3rd year students regarding their OSCE on the universities online bulletin board. Students reported on the board that they had prior knowledge of exam content before sitting the exam. Of the 40 students contributing to the online discussion, most claimed to have content knowledge or knew of someone else who had received knowledge. Analysis of overall mean results over the two days, however, showed no significant difference. Brown et al. (Citation1999) report a dental OSCE whereby the morning and afternoon cohorts were not separated at lunchtime, with no statistical difference in marks reported between the two groups.
Whilst there are many proposed methods of quarantining, other work indicates that the practice may not be necessary. Further work should include a multi-centre analysis of exam metrics based on different types of quarantine practice to establish if this procedure is necessary and acceptable to all stakeholders.
Declaration of interest: The author reports no conflicts of interest.
References
- Brown G, Manogue M, Martin M. 1999. The validity and reliability of an OSCE in dentistry. Eur J Dent Educ 3(3):117–125
- Parks R, Warren P, Boyd K, Cameron H, Cumming A, Lloyd-Jones G. 2006. The Objective Structured Clinical examination and student collusion: Marks do not tell the whole truth. J Med Ethics 32(12):734–738