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Abstract
Background: The Professional and Linguistics Assessment Board of the General Medical Council examines foreign candidates wishing to practice medicine in the United Kingdom. Several separate tests and 1 conjoint test of each component (medicine and English) are used.
Purpose: This investigation aimed to determine how much the candidate's knowledge of English affected the ability to pass the medical component, and vice versa, and how much dependence between tests there was within each component.
Methods: The 14 examinations held during 1993 for 1,940 foreign candidates were analyzed. The technique used was to note whether, by and large, the candidates who failed 1 test were the same as or different from those who failed the other test(s). If the same candidates failed 2 tests, the overall pass rate was approximately the average of the separate pass rates of the 2 tests. If the candidates who failed 1 test passed the other and vice versa, then the product of the 2 pass rates approximated to the observed overall pass rate.
Results: Using this method, it was found that the language component of the examination was one-third dependent, two-thirds independent of the medical component that the one-third dependence was due to the Oral Language Test, and that the two-thirds independence was due to the Oral Medical Test. Moreover, the objective tests of medicine were independent of the subjective Oral Medical, and there was a similar incongruity between the subjective and oral tests of language.
Conclusions: Two hypotheses are advanced that might explain these results. They are not mutually exclusive, and data do not exist at present to demonstrate their relative importance. The method used should be applicable to other examinations using more than one test procedure.