Candidate's Ability Research Articles

A measure of competence. The first Mushin lecture.

The process by which an individual is finally recognised as a physician and licensed to practice medicine is long and complicated. The physician who chooses to specialise pursues additional study and after successfully completing both written and oral examinations may be certified by a 'specialty board'. Such certification is looked upon as evidence that the physician is competent to practice at the consultant level. The competent clinician possesses the intellectual capacity to make valid medical judgments and the technical expertise in his own special field to implement or to direct the implementation of such judgments. The written examination measures the pool of information essential for the individual to make valid medical judgments in the area tested. The oral examination examines attributes difficult to evaluate by other techniques since attributes demand both observation of the candidate and interaction with him. The oral exam is probably a better way to evaluate a candidate's ability to make clinical judgments, to synthesize information, to relate specific basis information to clinical problems presented and, to some extent, to test the ability of the candidate to react in stressful situations. Inadequacies of the oral examination continue to include a lack of objectivity and the potential for bias. Some specialty boards require certificates of clinical competence issued by the faculty of the training programme on behalf of applicants who seek certification in their specialty. In addition to such judgments of clinical competence, the concepts of peer review, licensure, recertification and continuing education all play a role in the elusive objective of assessing clinical competence.

Language‐Oriented Careers in the Federal Government*

SEVERAL ARTICLES have appeared recently which aim at answering the student's complaint: What can I do with a Bachelor of Arts degree in language besides teach?' A recent Modem Language Association publication, English: The Pre-Professional Major (1973) by Linwood Orange, though aimed at English majors, contains valuable suggestions for any liberal arts major. In an effort reorient the thinking of the liberal arts major towards his career potential, Professor Orange documents the fact that an English major, with his general liberal arts background, can enter careers in four major professional fields: law, medicine, business, and federal service. Above all other qualifications for a career in these.areas, the respondents Professor Orange's survey of professional organizations stressed a candidate's ability to become knowledgeable in previously unfamiliar areas.2

Language-Oriented Careers in the Federal Government

SEVERAL ARTICLES have appeared recently which aim at answering the student's complaint: What can I do with a Bachelor of Arts degree in language besides teach?' A recent Modem Language Association publication, English: The Pre-Professional Major (1973) by Linwood Orange, though aimed at English majors, contains valuable suggestions for any liberal arts major. In an effort reorient the thinking of the liberal arts major towards his career potential, Professor Orange documents the fact that an English major, with his general liberal arts background, can enter careers in four major professional fields: law, medicine, business, and federal service. Above all other qualifications for a career in these.areas, the respondents Professor Orange's survey of professional organizations stressed a candidate's ability to become knowledgeable in previously unfamiliar areas.2

The Presentation: Testing Potential New Faculty's Ability to Teach

when the paucity of students and the plethora of pedagogues have abated, when the groves of upper academe, judiciously pruned and intelligently fertilized, are healthy, the problem of selecting new faculty will again lie heavily upon us. Indeed, it lies upon us today, even if not so heavily as heretofore, since there are not so many positions available and infinitely more applicants for them. But if we have fewer opportunities to fill a vacancy, with the abundance of candidates the selection is in some ways more difficult than it ever was. Yet the procedure by which a candidate is chosen remains in the vast majority of institutions of higher learning unnecessarily limited in its resources and often disappointing in its results. In a relatively few schools (frequently the largest or the ivy-est) the question of whom to hire is easily answered: find the man or woman who has the best publication record in the highly specialized field in which the vacancy occurs. Accordingly, the chairman of a department, or some department members, or a committee therefrom supplemented by an administrator or two, will conscientiously peruse the works by an applicant and pass critical judgments upon those works. Largely independent of any other factors, they arrive at a consensus and a name or two. But at most, if not all, of the other institutions, teaching ability is the primary consideration. However, to discover how good a teacher a candidate is, most schools rely upon an abysmally small quantity of data. The credentials of candidates contain much about their abilities and achievements as students, as dissertation writers, as socially acceptable compotators. Sometimes the credentials contain tributes to diligence, to trustworthiness, infrequently to brilliance and originality, but usually nothing is stated about their teaching. On occasion there may be a sentence or two, but never in my examination of stacks of dossiers have I seen anything relating to a candidate's teaching accumulate to a well-developed paragraph. And obviously, for the substantial number of applicants who have never taught, there can be no statements in their files about their teaching. What I am suggesting is a procedure I and others call a presentation, a procedure by which a demonstration of a candidate's teaching ability becomes a regular part of the campus visit, which is nowadays a standard preliminary to the tendering of a contract. This article and its recommendations derive from the experiences over several years of several departments among them sociology, political science, and especially English of which I was the interim head at Bradley University. But the presentation did not originate at Bradley, which happens to be a private, middle-sized urban university (in Peoria, Illinois), and it has been used in a variety of forms at a small number of institutions in the United States. It is my hope in writing this article that many more schools will be persuaded to incorporate it as a required part of the hiring process. The benefits to all concerned students, faculty, administration, and yea! the candidates too will be significant.1 Quite simply, the presentation is a kind of teach-in. When the candidate is invited to the campus, he or she is informed that he is expected to teach a lesson of thirty to fifty minutes (traditionally the collegiate hour). The candidate should be urged to prepare the lesson carefully, since it will be one of several factors considered in th overall judgment of his desirability as a faculty member. He can use any method he likes: lecture, question and answer, discussion, any combination of

Beating the interview: some hints

IN THE MODERN library profession, advancement and promotion often depend on selection interviews. It is argued that these favour candidates gifted with verbal facility and militate against those without the ‘gift of the gab’. In defence of the system, however, it must be remembered that today's librarians are communicators—ranging from the junior explaining why a book cannot be renewed, to the chief arguing with the library committee for increased resources. A librarian is no longer a book‐loving recluse. Successful performance in his job calls for communication, whether he is acting as readers adviser, staff manager, or library school lecturer. It is therefore perhaps not entirely unreasonable that the final stage in most staff selection processes should be a demonstration of the candidate's ability to think on his feet.

Medical Examination Review Book, Volume 16, Otolaryngology.

It is stated in the preface of this book that "there are no shortcuts to learning" and that "this question material is provided to facilitate the reader in checking his areas of weakness." With this clearly understood the book may be recommended only after a candidate's course of study is completed and before his final review is begun. The variations in test questions (1,200 multiple choice) are offered to familiarize the reader with various types of National Board, State Board, and school examinations in use today. Familiarity with multiple choice techniques is an acquired art but unnecessary for the American Board of Otolaryngology which conducts oral examinations. The moment of truth in an oral examination is determined by the candidate's ability to retrieve requested information from his own memory pool during face to face combat with his examination adversary; and the cultured ability to select the correct answer from a

AN OBJECTIVE EVALUATION OF CLINICAL COMPETENCE. NEW TECHNICS USED BY THE NATIONAL BOARD OF MEDICAL EXAMINERS.

APPROXIMATELY five years ago the National Board of Medical Examiners undertook to study and, if possible, to devise new means of evaluating the complex and subtle aspects of clinical competence that traditional testing methods barely touch. Examinations in the preclinical sciences (as in Part I of the National Board examinations) and in the clinical sciences (Part II) had been well established as highly reliable tests of medical knowledge and a candidate's ability to apply his knowledge to the problem in hand.1 , 2 Could methods be developed to evaluate with equal validity and reliability such essential components of medical competence as skill . . .

Applied Physics in the Graduateship Examination

The Institute's Graduateship Examination, as a new external examination free from the difficulties of co-ordination between different centres, offers an excellent opportunity to depart from the conventional type of examination question in favour of questions which provide a better test of the candidate's ability to make use of his knowledge in connection with the sort of problem he is liable to have to tackle in his employment. This is particularly true of the applied physics papers which are often closely linked with the candidate's day-to-day duties and which cover aspects of physics with which he might be expected to be reasonably familiar on a broader basis than that usually associated with examinations. Since the type of question which is most suitable for this sort of examination and candidate, and which is referred to in more detail later, seems to be somewhat different from that to which candidates and teachers are accustomed, there may at first be some difficulty in preparing candidates for this examination.

CORRESPONDENCE

As examiner in pediatrics for the National Board of Medical Examiners, I would like to bring to the attention of the pediatricians an important change in Part III of the examination, as it involves pediatrics. This is the oral examination given at the end of a year's internship by "subsidiary boards" in 29 medical centers throughout the country. The clinical nature of the examination provides an opportunity to determine the candidate's ability to apply the knowledge which he has previously demonstrated in the written examination of Parts I and II. For many years the examination has included medicine, surgery, and obstetrics as major subjects, while pediatrics has been included in a group of specialties as being of minor importance.

Examinations and Ability

IN an examination in any school subject, the maximum mark being 100, different distributions of the candidates among the hundred-and-one possible marks or percentiles are possible; different distributions are in fact found to result from two examinations of the same pupils in the same subject. The views expressed by Mr. B. C. Wallis in a privately printed pamphlet, “Mass Methods of Examining Children,” a copy of which has reached us, may be stated as three propositions, of which the first two are: (1) an examination mark is not in general a measure of the ability of the candidate, but merely a symbol by means of which the candidate's rank in order of merit can be determined; (2) in order to obtain a mark that is a measure of the candidate's ability the examiner's marks must be adjusted to an appropriate standard distribution, the same for all cases.