MBChB assessment is to guide you towards success, assist academic staff and innovation in the course, demonstrating appropriate knowledge, skills and attitudes progress through the course.
Good assessment sits at heart of Leeds MBChB programme - to guide our students towards success, assist academic staff and innovation in the course and most of all, to ensure those students who demonstrate appropriate knowledge, skills and attitudes progress through the course and graduate to be amongst the UK’s best doctors. We take assessment very seriously, with a huge amount of time, energy and expertise expended to ensure we have a fair and high quality process – and hold ourselves accountable for its success. This has led to lots of innovation to improve your experience on the course – e.g. using mobile technology to deliver better assessment and feedback and introducing sequential testing to make our exams ‘even fairer’.
We may be biased, but we are justifiably proud of the achievements of all of our students and our graduates. We get great feedback every year from students who have graduated and report back about how they are doing (many of whom come back to teach on the course!). We see incredible performance – during in-course assessment, at end of year exams, in projects and external work. One of the real pleasures for me is receiving emails from NHS staff and patients who continue to be impressed by our students, both during the year and at exam time.
This table shows all key assessments within MBChB by Year and each assessment format is tagged with a relevant association (K=Knowledge; S=Skills; A=Attitudes). Students first need to successfully complete all the in-course progression (non graded passes) items, with satisfactory attendance and professional attributes. This allows them to sit the high stakes end of year assessments, and then progress to the next year if everything is passed (or graduate at the end of year 5).
Students often ask why there seems to be a delay between sitting the exam and getting results, and why ‘other medical schools do it much more quickly’. Our simple answer to this is ‘Quality’. A lot of in-course assessment and end of year exams generate a huge amount of material – which needs checking, scanning, marking and cross checking (and for some components, second marking). For end of year exams, we undertake a lot of statistical analysis to make sure the exams are fair, that there is no error or difference due to time of exam, which group you were in or where the exam was held (e.g. for our OSCEs).
If you’ve been into the Learning & Teaching Office on Level 7, you’ll have seen that there are a number of academic and professional support staff devoted to running assessments. As we are running different assessments, the process tends to be very complex, involves a lot of planning – with some assessments (such as the OSCE) needing a year to plan in advance.