The exploration and exam quality analysis of 'Probability' course for foreign medical students

Abstract

Objective The exam quality of ' Probability' course for foreign medical undergraduates was analyzed, aiming at providing some reference for the improvement of the student evaluation system and course quality. Methods The ' Probability' course exam scores of 167 foreign un-dergraduates of 2014 batch were collected, the students were divided into two classes according to their entrance date, the former part class A consisted of 90 students, the latter part class B consisted of 77 students. The reliability of the test paper was judged according to Cronbach's α, Hotelling's T2 and Pearson correlation coefficient. The Spearman correlation analysis was adopted to evaluate the cor-relation between the question items. For the two classes, the impact of the entrance time on the test scores was explored on the basis of Student's t- test of question item scores and the total scores. Results The average score of the course exam was 82.587 points with the standard deviation of 13.520, Kol-mogorov-Smirnov statistic was 1.627 (P=0.010), the exam scores could not follow normal distribution. The Cronbach's α for the exam paper was 0.808, the standard-ized Cronbach's α was 0.815. The Spearman correlation coefficients between the five question items were all with statistical significance and varied from 0.315 to 0.657. As the students were divided into two classes according to their entrance date, for the ' Probability' section scores of the latter batch students were less than the scores of the former batch, with the difference 4.017 points, the same situation was also found that all the five items in the ' Probability' section. Conclusions The entrance time for the foreign medical freshman has an impact on their exam scores, suggesting that more attention should be paid to those students. Key words: Foreign students; Probability; Score analysis; Clinical medicine