Taleghani Mohsen, Solomon Eric S, Wathen William F
Department of General Dentistry, Baylor College of Dentistry, 3302 Gaston Avenue, Room 313, Dallas, TX 76246, USA.
J Dent Educ. 2006 May;70(5):500-10.
This article details how Baylor College of Dentistry (BCD) merges graded and nongraded aspects of student assessments into grade point averages (GPAs); explains the use of its assessment tools to evaluate students, faculty, and curriculum simultaneously; and calls for continuous progress and quality improvement toward educational excellence among all levels of the oral health education community. "Nongraded" student assessments at BCD are only applicable to preclinical and chairside activities that involve direct patient care. We further summarize how we have attempted to improve the accuracy of grading while providing objective numeric grades to measure student performance and generate a class rank. We suggest that faculty evaluation and curricular change require appropriate evaluation methods and continuous quality improvement based on the chosen assessment methodologies. We then summarize how we merge graded and nongraded assessments into a final student evaluation that realistically discriminates among students' performance and present our numeric-to-letter grade conversion table. We conclude that 1) multiple strategies are required, available, and adequate to provide graduates with the numerical GPAs demanded by postdoctoral programs and that 2) continuous quality improvement among all levels of the oral health education community should be vigorously pursued by administration and faculty alike.
本文详细介绍了贝勒牙科学院（BCD）如何将学生评估的分级和非分级方面纳入平均绩点（GPA）；解释了如何使用其评估工具同时评估学生、教师和课程；并呼吁口腔健康教育界各级在追求卓越教育方面不断进步和提高质量。BCD的“非分级”学生评估仅适用于涉及直接患者护理的临床前和临床实习活动。我们进一步总结了我们如何在提供客观数字成绩以衡量学生表现并生成班级排名的同时，努力提高评分的准确性。我们建议教师评估和课程改革需要适当的评估方法，并基于所选评估方法进行持续的质量改进。然后，我们总结了我们如何将分级和非分级评估合并为最终的学生评估，以切实区分学生的表现，并展示我们的数字成绩到字母成绩的转换表。我们得出结论：1）需要、有且足够的多种策略为毕业生提供博士后项目要求的数字GPA；2）口腔健康教育界各级的持续质量改进应由行政部门和教师共同大力推进。
