Beschreibung:
<jats:p>United States medical schools are moving to multiple choice‐style assessments, away from traditional fill‐in, for anatomy practical exams. Practical exams for medical students have long consisted of identifying anatomical structures and writing the answer on an answer sheet. This study reports several aspects of this change at two medical schools: New York Medical College and SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University. The report also documents the evolution of opinion of faculty, teaching assistants [TAs] and students with respect to the benefits of each testing modality. Student t‐tests were used to compare test score data between the two testing modalities employed at each institution. Results showed there were no statistically significant differences between fill‐in and MCQ mean scores for NY Med (5 years of fill‐in vs 5 years of MCQ) and Downstate (5 years of fill‐in vs one year of MCQ), 0.5 and 0.7 (<jats:bold><jats:italic>p</jats:italic></jats:bold> < 0.05), respectively. Resistance and support for the transition from faculty, TAs and students were common from both schools irrespective of constancy in student performance between the two testing formats. The quantitative results were surprising as an expected increase in the statistical mean in the MCQ format did not occur. Logistical and pedagogical merits of each exam format were assessed. Faculty and TAs resistant to MCQ exams predicted that offering choices would provide an advantage, as there would be a 25% chance of having a correct choice against the binary of a correct or incorrect written answer. TAs felt that a fill‐in format tapped into a higher cognitive level to reach the correct answer. Students with English as their second language, on the other hand, strongly supported the MCQ exam format. MCQ exams had the benefit of being corrected within 10 minutes of submission with Item Analysis accompanying the report allowing identification of poorly tagged questions and providing the opportunity to make corrections in real time for the entire class. Effectively assessing medical student competence must be addressed in contemporary curriculum design but is MCQ a reliable way to do so?</jats:p>