Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) during Psychiatry clerkship in a Saudi university

Background: The purpose of this study was to investigate the validity of the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) through comparing students OSCE performance against the traditional forms of students evaluation. Subjects and methods: We analyzed the OSCE performance of 110 fifth-year medical students against, Traditional Oral Clinical Examinations (TOCE), portfolio and multiple choice questions (MCQ) written exam. A selfadministered student survey included an eight item questionnaire assessing different aspects of the OSCE. Results: There were significant correlations between OSCE performance and all forms of psychiatry exams, except those belonging to the MCQ. Simple linear regression showed that OSCE accounted for 65.1% of the variance in total clinical and 31.5% of the final marks. Student survey showed that more females agreed that OSCE was a fair assessment of clinical clerk s skills compared to their male counterparts. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that the OSCE is similar to the traditional methods in evaluating the performance in a standardized manner. Teaching programs need to identify which aspects of the OSCE cause difficulty to students. This information would be useful for future developments in undergraduate teaching.