Medical student’s dyslexia battle with exam MCQs
September 14th, 2008
Is dyslexia stopping dyslexic students from taking MCQ exams? Thats what one student thinks. If she wins, and things change, other trade bodies may have to follow suit.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7530159.stm
Its a funny one – how do you adapt the multiple choice question style exams to suit disabilities. At the moment its central to passing your student medical exams. Indeed, a lot of our site content is geared to preparing you to pass multiple choice questions by giving you loads to use and practise with.
We’ll see what the outcome is…could it have a major impact on medical student exams in the future?
This was posted by one of our administrators:
I think this represents quite a difficult issue. One of the challenges facing doctors is part of the “real world” testing: if people struggle with words, figures and phrases in terms of medication dosing and administration this potentially leads to serious health risks.
Imagine the consequences of administering adrenaline either by the wrong route (e.g. IV instead of IM in a given clinical situation) or misreading a dose when checking a patients medication. Clearly the balance between…
1.) Accommodating disability and
2.) Fitness to practice
…is a very fine line