The overall average score of medical students on MedicalEducator.

The following weeks will represent the culmination of years of hard work by medical students over the past 1-5 years. Revision patterns have been changing and increasingly medical students are approaching final examinations preparing for them using web based MCQ, OSCE and video guides. For the first time, resources like podcasts and the like have taken a firm footing in the medical students preparation for final examinations.

One technique of sitting mock written papers has long been popular. Short answer questions, EMQ and MCQ format questions help people to prepare.

To quote one of our contributors:

I always felt more comfortable preparing for any exam, and I mean any, by running through exactly what I should know, first from a theoretical perspective, then from a practical perspective. If that meant filling in multiple choice questions, I got a book on multiple choice questions. It was what it was.

Maybe you’d like the opportunity to measure yourself against other medical students across the UK or

The average mark in one of our mock final examinations, which was added to the site in April 09.

across the world. A good example of this is our *(tough) mock medical finals paper. This is designed for students sitting year 1, year 2, year 3 year 4 or final examinations, which have a clinical component.

The average for this exam is 49.6%. Tough. But will it help you learn? A comment from a subscriber:

You keep doing questions where a principle that you didn’t understand is explained in the answer. Thats the value of them.

Overall this is a stressful time for medical students, on behalf of the Medical Educator team, good luck in those examinations.

UMAP, one organisation currently working to standardise medical student exam question content across medical schools

It’s essentially the organisation which is writing/ collecting a bank of medical student exam questions for use in ‘high stakes’ examinations, such as medical finals.

UMAP’s description of their activities can be found on their website: On the site they describe themselves as follows:

UMAP’s aim is to improve quality in high stakes written assessments across UK medical schools. UMAP runs best practice item writing sessions where clinical and academic staff come together to learn about item writing techniques and to represent their subject area in the developing question bank.

UMAP QA process

Once written, questions move on to be quality assured at UMAP question review meetings which are convened at our partner schools. Staff members with experience in assessment and who are familiar with UMAP style and technique check each question and amend as necessary to ensure the highest accuracy and conformity to question writing principles. Questions are then ready for use and are listed as part of selection documentation available to our partner medical schools.

Schools are invited to select the items they wish to use and then confirm their selections to us. Schools later return results data in an electronic format which is then analysed and uploaded into the UMAP bank. A summary of this data is displayed within question selection documentation to enable schools to make informed, evidence based, item choices.  [Accessed 4.03.09 from http://www.umap.org.uk/about/]

From their site they cover about 14 medical schools and they run an active recruitment of Specialist Registrars to write questions for their bank, most recently to our knowledge in Birmingham at a West Midlands General Internal Medicine training day.

UMAP currently publish on their site that as of October 2008 they have over 2500 questions for use in the these high stakes examinations. They acknowledge that they seem to be lacking in a few key areas, however they are currently working to address this.

What do you need to know about UMAP as a medical student? Well probably not that much. In fact all UMAP really are trying to do is generate sensible MCQ questions that are fair, and are well written. They have a reasonably complicated list of rules that a number of ME’s contributors have been talked through at a number of different times: overall though its not rocket science.

• you shouldn’t be able to answer a question just by using the investigation result or the stem on its own (e.g. a big intro and then showing an ECG with complete heart block etc.)
• The questions are aimed at core FY1 knowledge
• You should be able to guess the likely options for the answer (again straight forward)

In principle, when UMAP look at the answers for any given question, they check that these same answers seem reasonable. They also like the same level of detail for both (for example the answers should all be of similar length).

What about the stem’s themselves: again UMAP make some sensible judgements including avoidance of medical jargon, avoiding using the same words in the questions and the answers etc. They should be readable and comprehensible.

So is there any technique involved? Well yes! Look carefully at results an investigations. Its clear that UMAPs strategy will be not to spoon feed the reader. For example if an important feature is tachycardia the question may read as follows

Ther pulse rate was 124 – Rather than mentioning the tachycardia directly, or showing a picture of an ECG

The same goes for investigation reults: e.g. K+ 3.0 mmol/l (NR 3.5-5.5 mmol/l) rather than ‘hypokalaemia’

All this means is that you have to look carefully at the investigation answers, and then draw conclusions. The rest is guesswork? Not really. Simple mathematics state that you should rule out the maximum number of wrong answers, and maximise your chance of success.

Medical Educator or its wuestion writers have not contributed any questions to the UMAP quesiton bank and have no formal or informal association with the organisation. We’d be interested to hear students comments and opinions about the work done by UMAP.

Medical educator is expanding week on week and we’re hoping to provide relevant content for all our international users. We’ve now topped over 70 countries using the service, with the top 4 countries using our service to search for medical student exam revision services being the UK, USA, India and Canada.

Check out the world map below, the darker the shade, the bigger the proportion of users from that country.

Used in > 70 countries and Rising