Abstract
Background: Examination methods change over time, and audits are useful for quality assurance and improvement. Objective: Comparison of traditional clinical test and objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) in a department of surgery.
 Methods: Examination records of results of the fifth year MBChB examinations for 2012–2013 (traditional) and 2014–2015 (OSCE) were analyzed. Using 50% as the pre-agreed pass mark, the pass rate for the clinical examinations in each year was calculated and these figures were subjected to t-test to determine any significant differences in each year and in type of clinical test. P value of <0.05 determined significant statistical differences in the test score.
 Results: We analyzed 1178 results; most (55.6%) did OSCE. The average clinical scores examinations were 59.7% for traditional vs 60.1% for OSCE examination; basic surgical skills were positively skewed.
 Conclusion: OSCE in the same setting of teaching and examiners may give more marks than the traditional clinical examination, but it is better at detecting areas of inadequacies for emphasis in teaching.
 Keywords: Clinical examination, Traditional, OSCE, Comparison
Highlights
Assessing clinical competence is one of the major tasks any medical teacher faces at the end of the term, and it gets gruesome at the end of the year
The traditional clinical examination consisted of one long case: the student was given 45 minutes to obtain history, perform physical examination, formulate diagnosis and differentials, and make notes on how they would manage the patient
The move towards objective assessment in medical education has seen the traditional methods of assessment of long case, short case and orals replaced with objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) in most medical schools the world over [6]
Summary
Assessing clinical competence is one of the major tasks any medical teacher faces at the end of the term, and it gets gruesome at the end of the year This is because the teacher’s decision determines, in a short space of time, whether the candidate passes or fails on one hand, and on the other hand whether the safety of the community in which the candidate should be released is protected. The implicit reason in choosing one case was, perhaps rather naïvely, the assumption that experienced doctors had the skills to immediately identify good or weak students on a single patient interaction, and that this was predictive of any patient interaction [4] It is not surprising that once the importance of context specificity was realized, both undergraduate and postgraduate clinical assessments have moved to the multi-station format of the OSCE [4]. Conclusion: OSCE in the same setting of teaching and examiners may give more marks than the traditional clinical examination, but it is better at detecting areas of inadequacies for emphasis in teaching
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