Adewoye E O, Oyebola O D, Bamgboye E A
Dept. of Physiology, Dept. of Preventive and Social Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria.
Afr J Med Med Sci. 2000 Jun;29(2):155-9.
The performance of 540 medical (MBBS) and 55 dental (BDS) students in short essay questions (SEQs) in preclinical physiology was compared with their performance in long essay questions (LEQs). The cohort was made up of 88 repeating and 452 non-repeating MBBS students and 12 repeating and 43 non-repeating BDS students. The SEQs and LEQs used for the study were those administered to the students in the paper II of the Part I MBBS/BDS examination. The results showed that all the students did significantly better in LEQs than in SEQs. When the students were sub-divided into repeaters and non-repeaters, performance in LEQs was still significantly better in all cases, except in the BDS repeaters where the difference was not significant. The study also showed that the BDS students did significantly better than the MBBS students in LEQs. Further analysis showed that the latter was due to a much better performance in LEQ 4 by the BDS students. In the SEQs, MBBS non-repeaters did better than repeaters while the situation was reversed with the BDS students. For all categories of students, on no occasion was the mean score in the LEQs or the SEQs up to 20.0, which is the 50% score and pass mark in this examination. The likely reasons for the better performance of the students in LEQs than in SEQs were discussed. The better performance of the BDS students in LEQs is believed to be due to the double exposure time of the BDS students to the topics from which LEQ 4 is drawn. From our results, it was concluded that LEQs are more useful than SEQs in assessing these students. In addition, the highly significant cross-correlation between scores in questions 1, 2, 3 and 4 suggested that the inherent problem of examiners' subjective judgement in essay marking could be minimized in both SEQs and LEQs. Finally, failure to achieve a mean score of 50% (pass mark) in both SEQs and LEQs suggested that the students are weak in essay writing. Possible reasons for this were suggested.
将540名医学（MBBS）专业学生和55名牙医学（BDS）专业学生在临床前生理学短论文问题（SEQ）中的表现与其在长论文问题（LEQ）中的表现进行了比较。该队列由88名复读的MBBS专业学生和452名非复读的MBBS专业学生以及12名复读的BDS专业学生和43名非复读的BDS专业学生组成。用于该研究的SEQ和LEQ是在MBBS/BDS考试第一部分的试卷II中发给学生的题目。结果显示，所有学生在LEQ中的表现都明显优于在SEQ中的表现。当学生被细分为复读生和非复读生时，除了BDS专业复读生的差异不显著外，在所有情况下，LEQ中的表现仍然明显更好。该研究还表明，BDS专业学生在LEQ中的表现明显优于MBBS专业学生。进一步分析表明，后者是由于BDS专业学生在LEQ 4中的表现要好得多。在SEQ中，MBBS专业非复读生的表现优于复读生，而BDS专业学生的情况则相反。对于所有类别的学生，在任何情况下，LEQ或SEQ的平均分数都未达到20.0，而20.0是该考试的50%分数和及格分数。讨论了学生在LEQ中表现优于SEQ的可能原因。BDS专业学生在LEQ中表现更好被认为是由于BDS专业学生对LEQ 4所涉及主题有两倍的接触时间。根据我们的结果，得出结论：在评估这些学生时，LEQ比SEQ更有用。此外，问题1、2、3和4的分数之间高度显著的交叉相关性表明，在SEQ和LEQ中，考官在论文评分中主观判断的固有问题都可以最小化。最后，在SEQ和LEQ中均未达到平均分数50%（及格分数）表明学生在论文写作方面较为薄弱。对此提出了可能的原因。
