Ca. Brailovsky et al., RESIDENCY DIRECTORS PREDICTIONS OF CANDIDATES PERFORMANCES ON A LICENSING EXAMINATION, Academic medicine, 70(5), 1995, pp. 410-414
Citations number
13
Categorie Soggetti
Medicine Miscellaneus","Education, Scientific Disciplines
Purpose, To look at how well residency directors in family medicine pr
edict the performances of their candidates on the Quebec Licensing Exa
mination (QLEx) for family physicians. Method. The four family medicin
e program directors in Quebec were asked in the spring of 1992 to iden
tify the ten residents from their own programs who would get the highe
st marks on the QLEx and the ten who would get the lowest marks. From
the results of these candidates, and those of the intermediate groups
defined by default, the prediction abilities of the program directors
were assessed. Results. Descriptive statistics showed that the program
directors had difficulties discriminating among the different groups
and tended to collapse the predicted scores toward the total mean. Ana
lysis-of-variance studies confirmed the absence of difference between
the predicted weak and intermediate groups as well as between the pred
icted intermediate and strong groups for each program and for each QLE
x component. Regression analysis as well as eta(2) studies showed that
the program directors' prediction abilities were low for all componen
ts and represented less than 25% of the explained variance of the QLEx
scores. Conclusion. The residency directors did not accurately catego
rize their residents' performances on the QLEx. Both the evaluations o
f program directors and terminal examination results are complementary
approaches to clinical competence assessment and should be used for l
icensure.