Reliability of Examiners' Evaluations of Oral Presentations in Fixed Prosthodontics

Abstract

This study assessed the inter-examiner variability on student scores when assessing oral presentations in Fixed Prosthodontics course. Oral presentations of fifth-year dental students were randomly selected. Students presented their topic within 15 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of detailed personal feedback and group discussion. Three senior faculty members participated in the evaluation session based on predefined criteria. Four levels of grading for rating presentation as highly acceptable, acceptable, marginally acceptable, or unacceptable were used. The scoring patterns of the evaluators were statistically analyzed using Friedman's test. The study revealed significant differences among the mean rank scores of the evaluators (P=0.001) for all criteria. Moreover, the mean rank scores of the 3 evaluators for the total value of all criteria were significantly different (P=0.001). The pairwise comparison test showed significant difference between each pair of evaluators (P=0.001) for all criteria. However, the difference was not significant for the first and the third evaluators for the second criteria (P=0.238). There was significant difference between each pair of evaluators (P=0.001) for the total value of all criteria.